The Killing Room (30 page)

She raised a hand for the waiter, and gave their orders. She knew what Sandro would eat too, after all this time. Minestrone and grilled chicken. She saw the waiter glance down and it was only after he’d gone she realised she still had the newspaper on her lap. She set it on the table.

‘She was a monster, the
padrona di casa
,’ she said. ‘The landlady. Sharp-eyed, though. And sounds like she worked on the
carabinieri
, too.’

‘So what did you find out?’ said Sandro.

The waiter was back, setting down the dishes. Beans flecked with parsley and black pepper, gleaming with oil, chicken deliciously blackened from the griddle, ribboned pasta with artichokes for Luisa. It smelled good: it smelled like heaven. Luisa realised she hadn’t eaten all day.

But first things first. She left her knife and fork where they were; at the sight of the food her head had cleared and it was all there.

‘He was doing business with some old army friends. It was them he called when he got fired, that’s number one. The first thing she knew he was gay was that same night, when a man came round to see him. For a bit of rough play, that’s what he told her when she complained about the noise.’

‘Hold on,’ said Sandro. ‘Which night is this? The night he died? What man? Vito had been sleeping with Magda Scardino.’

‘That,’ said Luisa drily, ‘doesn’t surprise me.’ She cocked her head. ‘Although if Maratti didn’t know about it, it wasn’t at his place. Do you think he used her apartment?’

Sandro didn’t seem to hear. ‘She said he wanted something from her. But could you – he – a gay man do that, whatever he had to gain from it?’

Luisa looked at him, wondering how her dear husband, with thirty years in the police force, sometimes seemed to know so much less about the world than she did. ‘You’d be surprised,’ she said.

‘I don’t believe he was gay,’ he repeated stubbornly.

‘Nor do I,’ Luisa said. ‘For the record. Magda would have known. And it wasn’t the night he died, because Maratti – the landlady – she saw him the next day, and she thought he was going on holiday. Back to Bari, is what she thought.’

‘Bari?’ He was on full alert now. ‘John Carlsson was on a case in Bari too, last year.’

‘Yes,’ Luisa said, and she picked up her knife and fork thoughtfully. ‘Maratti said they had the drains up. They found blood in the bathtub.’ She nodded down at the newspaper headline. ‘What’s the betting it’s her has been talking to the papers?’ She twisted some pasta round her fork. ‘She said his mother hadn’t been to get his things, that the Carabinieri wouldn’t let anyone touch his place.’

‘His mother?’

‘He must have been forced to introduce them,’ said Luisa, pondering. ‘She spent her life looking out for his visitors. She said a man from the army came and the Carabinieri sealed his rooms off.’

‘Right,’ said Sandro, beginning to see something. Wondering why it had taken him so long. ‘He never looked like he’d had leukaemia to me.’

‘Maratti said that, too,’ said Luisa. ‘And I always thought it was only kids survived it. What’s that got to do with it, though?’

‘Nothing,’ he said. ‘Not yet, anyway. A theory.’

She frowned at him. ‘Do you know what I was wondering?’ Sandro just gazed at her. ‘What do you think made Maratti think he was going on holiday?’

‘On holiday.’ Sandro stared.

‘The next day, she thought he was going on holiday, saw him go out in the afternoon. It’s why she used her passkey to poke around in his room the following morning. What would make you assume someone was going on holiday, not just out?’

He looked at her.

‘If he had a suitcase with him,’ he said slowly. ‘A big suitcase.’

‘And the man he was having rough sex with,’ Luisa said. ‘Tallish, skinny, dark?’

‘You saw him, at the launch, too, didn’t you?’ said Sandro. ‘You saw John Carlsson. Skinny guy, dark eyes. I guess he was taller than me.’

Luisa looked down at the expensive pasta on her fork, but suddenly her appetite was gone. She laid it down. ‘Vito’s landlady never saw him leave.’

‘It was Vito,’ said Sandro. ‘Vito killed him, hacked him, folded him into the suitcase and hauled him to the station. Yes.’ He took a breath. ‘Christ. He must have been wired. He must have been angry.’

On the table Sandro’s mobile jittered. Looking down she read the caller’s name upside down.
Falco
.

*

Elena lay awake, staring into the dark. He was asleep at last. He lay there in her bed like a felled animal, a big one at that, looking out of place, alien, immovable. He had cried and cried; she hadn’t been able to ask him to go, after that. Was he dangerous? Not asleep, he wasn’t. She sat up and put out a hand tentatively, feeling his warmth through the sheet, thinking how odd it was that she’d been the one who’d ended up giving comfort.

Whatever had happened at the hospital, it had worn him out. He must have loved the old woman.

She squeezed her eyes shut, thinking of the shape of John in her bed and how different it was. He’d slept restlessly, feverish to the touch, not this big steady warmth. He’d come to bed after her, he’d disappear in the night.

Downstairs she’d heard her phone blip some time back, telling her there was a message, but she would look at it in the morning. After all, what else was there that could happen? What else to be afraid of? She lay back down, stared at the ceiling and waited for sleep to come.

*

The intensive care ward hummed quietly with machines in the dark, the small glow of bedside examination lamps on standby punctuating the long, warm room. The patients on
intensive care were not in a position to complain about the noise their neighbours made, to ask for the lights to be put out, or to cause any kind of trouble at all, apart from dying. It was a nice safe billet and it suited Ginevra Craxi, the ward sister, very well. You had to stay on your toes, but it was medical, not people management, not wailing relatives – at least, not until the end.

An alarm bleeped discreetly on the panel behind the desk. The old woman was ninety-odd, and this wasn’t so bad a way to go. The nurse who’d been attending to her came, unhurried and silent on rubber soles out of the darkness, with the old lady’s chart on its clipboard in her hand.

Ginevra looked at her and in answer to the unspoken question the junior nurse shook her head. ‘Not yet,’ she said. ‘But I don’t think it’ll be long. Her stats are all dropping.’

The ward sister seesawed her head. ‘It happens,’ she said, taking the chart and looking down it. ‘Started falling off this afternoon, after the visitors. Sometimes that’s what does it, they wait for the loved ones to come and then they just let go. Even if they seem totally out of it. I wonder if we shouldn’t keep the loved ones away.’

‘Only they have to go sometime,’ chimed the younger woman, as they agreed on this.

‘This the next of kin?’ Ginevra frowned at the name at the top of the chart. ‘No children?’

‘No children, no husband.’

‘So he’s . . . something else.’ Ginevra nodded judiciously. ‘Did he come and visit her this afternoon? Was he one of them? Foreigners.’

The young nurse tipped her head sideways to see the name. ‘Don’t know,’ she said. ‘I came on after. I got the impression it had been women, from the girl going off duty.’

‘Interesting,’ said Ginevra. ‘You look at them when they come in and you can’t tell, though she did look . . . distinguished. She must have been well connected.’ Neither of them remarked on the use of the past tense, even though Athene Morris was still alive.

‘Interesting,’ said Ginevra again, handing the clipboard back to the girl.

And bowing over her week’s timetable behind the desk as the junior nurse retreated, she thought, around half-three in the morning, that’s when she’d likely enough go, just before dawn. You got an instinct for these things, like being a midwife, only instead of ushering them into the world, you’re helping them leave. The body has its rhythms, it’s when the will dips, deep in another world. She’d phone the next of kin when the sun was up, though, no point bothering him in the middle of the night: she wondered if he was lying awake now, wondered if he would grieve or be relieved.

Must be important, titled anyway. Sir Martin Fleming.

Chapter Twenty-Eight

C
LOUD HAD MOVED DOWN
in the night, from the mountains between Italy and Austria, down from Russia. Along the northern horizon a line of purple had bubbled up ominously over the Apennines.

Sandro stood in a car park and shivered. He’d left the house somewhere between six and seven, unable to lie still any longer. Awake since three, by around four the light had begun to filter thin and grey through the shutters. The days were getting longer, and he was too old to enjoy it.

Luisa had sat up blearily as he came to the bedroom door, ready to make him coffee, but he’d shushed her back under the covers. He’d rested a hand on her hair, and gone.

On the ringroad the traffic roared already, and somewhere off in the distance the siren of an ambulance sounded. A road accident, or an overdose, or a middle-aged man with chest pain, collapsed in his own bathroom.

Sandro had walked to the car in the cold morning, a wind whipping his ankles and setting the pigeons up into the air
as he crossed the Piazza Santa Croce. He’d sat a while before starting the engine, looking down at his messages. One from Giuli, sent last night, around one in the morning. Unable to sleep.
You think it was Lludic
? it said. He sat back in the seat. How to answer that? With the truth.
No, I don’t think it was Lludic
. Which didn’t quite cover it.

John Carlsson had got a taxi to Giancarlo Vito’s place. He could have gone from the Palazzo San Giorgio straight there, after he’d talked to Magda Scardino. She’d thought he’d been chatting her up, asking her if Vito was off the scene, but he wanted Vito.

What had he gone to see him about? Sandro was beginning to think he knew.

The newspaper report had said Giancarlo’s murder was a gay thing. Naked or near enough, a handweight to the back of the head. Bondage gone wrong, rough sex gone wrong. ‘Is that right?’ he’d asked Falco on the phone last night, sitting at the table in the Buca, his chicken congealing on the plate in front of him.

The man’s voice had been studiedly sombre. ‘It does rather look like it,’ he’d said. ‘Of course I regret very much that it’s been made public.’ Under the serious tone he didn’t sound regretful at all.

‘The landlady, was it?’ Sandro said. ‘She does like to talk. So my wife says.’ There was a silence as he allowed Falco to register that. ‘So it’s likely enough it will have been the man the neighbour saw leaving early that morning?’ Brett Van Vleet. Had Falco already identified him?

‘Unlikely we’ll ever trace him,’ said Falco, as if reading his mind. ‘That little square kilometre’s been up for development
the last ten years, they want to knock the villas down and build some condominium development. It’s all been left to get run down and so there are no security cameras till the one coming off the ringroad. It was dark, the neighbour’s not sure of detail. . .’

The message was clear enough, and familiar enough: let sleeping dogs lie. It’s in all our interests. The Palazzo San Giorgio’s dark cellars had been closed back up. Only dogshit kept appearing on the skirtings. And John Carlsson was dead and mutilated in the morgue.

‘And the blood and tissue you found in the drains,’ he’d said to Falco then. ‘You know whose it is, yet?’

‘I don’t know what you’re talking about, Cellini.’ The warning was unmistakable.

There’d been nothing about it in the newspaper report. ‘Ah, I must have got that wrong,’ Sandro said. ‘You know how rumours fly.’

Luisa had been watching him like a hawk across the table throughout the conversation, but when he hung up all she said was, ‘Eat it. Before it gets cold.’

Vito had killed John Carlsson. Why? And Falco might not know yet that the body had turned up, but he knew there was a body. And he was ready to cover it up. And why was that?

The answer was in there somewhere. Along with whoever killed Giancarlo Vito.

The little car park in front of the villa where both men had died was empty: the building was shuttered up as if the landlady had already had a warning from the Carabinieri. Sandro turned, three hundred and sixty degrees. There was a down at heel condo backing on to the car park that must have contained
the neighbour who saw Van Vleet, but there was no sign of anyone watching now. There was the overhead section of the ringroad, the distant illuminated sign of a Holiday Inn, the tops of umbrella pines leading towards the river. Slowly he skirted the villa, keeping his footsteps soft. The shutters remained closed. Sandro kept walking round.

At the corner, out of sight of the shuttered windows, he paused. He could see the fire escape: a metal stair leading up to a balcony. Carlsson had come in by the front door. A strip of scrubby grass and some arthritic plum trees, petals turning brown on the grass underneath them. Out of the corner of his eye Sandro saw something move under the trees, an animal, and he knelt to get a better view. It was a cat, one of those odd, thin, big-eared creatures, like a sphinx. He held out a hand and rubbed fingers and thumb together. It hesitated, stepped towards him delicately, paws crossing. In his pocket the phone vibrated and slowly he extracted it.

‘Hello?’ The cat paused, then resumed its dancer’s walk towards him.

‘Why are you whispering?’ It was Luisa. ‘Someone called from the Palazzo San Giorgio.’ He looked at his watch: to his surprise it was close to eight o’clock.

‘At home?’ In front of him now the cat raised its bony triangular face to his, wide-spaced eyes with that devil’s slit in them. He held his hand out, as much to keep the thing away as to show he meant no harm.

‘She said she couldn’t get you on the cellphone.’ No surprise there: in half the city there was no mobile reception. Her voice strained with its burden of fatigue and bad news. ‘It
was Cornell. The old lady who had the stroke. Or whatever. She died.’

And the cat swiped, claws extended. It caught him above the thumb, a long scratch that drew blood, welling immediately along its length. He jerked back, shocked beyond reason.