A Murder in Tuscany (6 page)

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Authors: Christobel Kent

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BOOK: A Murder in Tuscany
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‘Of course,’ said Luca, and she was in no doubt who was the boss now, ‘you’ll have to live in, you know, at least for now. You’ll have to go and collect some things, today. Now; Mauro’ll take you in the – um – ’ He stopped, and they stared at each other. The Monster was gone, wasn’t it? Cate wondered if it was a write-off, or perhaps the police would need to examine it? When, ten years earlier, a school friend had flipped his car – under the influence of not very much marijuana and a couple of cocktails – and died on a roundabout on the outskirts of Arezzo one Friday night, the police had put the Datsun Cherry in the crusher without delay or ceremony. His parents had given it to him on his eighteenth birthday three weeks earlier.
Holding Luca’s friendly, trusting gaze, Cate swallowed.
‘We’ll be getting another car soon,’ said Luca evenly. ‘But in the meantime Mauro can take you in the pick-up.’
‘Yes,’ she said, resigned. Vincenzo, she thought, but already he was receding, his hopeful face at the checkout, beaming up at her, his eager voice on the mobile this morning. She’d think of something. It seemed as though her time was up; Luca was on his computer, checking something, frowning at the screen. She stood to go.
‘Oh,’ said Luca, looking up, ‘listen, I know you’re up to this, Caterina. I wouldn’t have asked if I didn’t.’
‘Right,’ said Cate. But there was something in his voice that told her Luca Gallo wasn’t even sure if he was up to it himself. Whatever it turned out to be.
 
 
‘He called again, you know,’ said Giuli, as soon as they were sitting down inside.
The make-up hadn’t been that great an idea, Sandro decided, although it did have the advantage of making her look marginally closer to him in age. Rough around the edges though she might be, Giuli could look fine, unadorned, now she had a bit more weight on her. There was a liveliness in her face, a crinkled-up, well-worn sort of look that Sandro had a soft spot for, only make-up turned it clownish. ‘You look nice,’ he’d said on the pavement, trying to be kind, but she’d just shaken her head at him. ‘I know what I look like, Sandro,’ she’d said. ‘Let’s just convince the man on the door, shall we?’
The man on the door was in fact an Indian boy, maybe twenty years old, and he didn’t seem to care. ‘Members?’
Giuli had taken charge, stepping into the cramped space behind the curtained door. ‘Not yet,’ she said. ‘How much?’
At her shoulder Sandro had tried to look seedy, a middle-aged man – well, almost old – slipping off on a Friday afternoon with his bit on the side. God, he’d thought belatedly, what if Luisa hears?
‘Five euro each,’ the Indian boy had said without much interest, and Sandro had taken out his wallet. And that was it: they were in.
Almost immediately Sandro had wished he was back out on the street. The room they’d edged into was kitted out in a fake Moroccan style, tasselled velvet clashing horribly with wall-to-wall leopard print. A false ceiling had been fitted to squeeze in a mezzanine overhead, making the place screamingly claustrophobic, and certainly a deathtrap in any kind of emergency situation. Fire, for example. In one corner a man Sandro’s age was sitting next to a sallow, bored-looking girl in a miniskirt, his hand on her thigh. He was leaning back against the leopard print, eyes half-closed. Averting his gaze, Sandro had followed Giuli up a spiral staircase in the corner.
The light was so bad, Sandro hadn’t seen them at first, then he’d nearly stumbled over the boy’s foot, stretched out into the cramped aisle between low Moroccan stamped-tin tables and banquettes and lampshades. There’d been a murmured exclamation, a hand raised palm out in apology, and to Sandro’s relief the foot withdrawn without a glance being exchanged. Not looking back, he’d proceeded to a vantage point on the far side of the cramped, dark room where Giuli had settled herself in a corner. Behind him a girl had tittered. Carlotta. He hadn’t known if she was laughing at him, at something the boys had said, or if she was just stoned.
This was what the parents wanted, wasn’t it? Yes, she’s taking drugs. Talk to her about it.
‘He phoned again,’ said Giuli then. ‘Luca Gallo.’
‘Oh,’ said Sandro glumly. ‘Sorry.’
‘It’s all right,’ said Giuli softly. ‘You were busy. But he did sound kind of – weird.’
‘You said that,’ said Sandro, remembering that she had. ‘Really?’ The softness of her voice had an odd effect on him; he felt the cushions trying to reclaim him, and stifled a yawn. It was like he’d entered a different world, where different rules applied. He thought of the man downstairs; how did he feel when he came back out, into the real world? What did he tell his wife, if he had a wife? Dangerous to come in here.
‘Uh huh,’ assented Giuli, ‘just a little bit freaked out. Something about an accident, he said.’
‘An accident,’ repeated Sandro absently. Luca Gallo. He laid his head back, and thought about that job, the woman with startling blue eyes, that castle in the Maremma. With Giuli, an expert in the art of computer applications, he’d looked for it on Google Earth, zoomed in on it, in from the bright blue sea and the coastal motorway, past ugly little towns in the flatlands. A great grey prison of a place around a courtyard, an avenue of trees, a scattering of outbuildings, standing proud and isolated. The bare hills around it, the narrow, empty country roads.
‘I’ll call him in the morning,’ said Sandro. ‘Did he leave a number?’
‘Yeah,’ she said. ‘And I gave him yours – your mobile, I mean. He said he was in and out. Keep trying, he said.’
‘Right,’ said Sandro.
His eyes had adjusted to the gloom by now, and he could distinguish the members of Carlotta’s little group. The boy Alberto lay with his head back, trance-like, and earphones in, just a slight rhythmic shifting of his head from side to side indicating that he was not asleep. Carlotta sitting up straight and eager: his heart sank, thinking that she did after all need his protection.
‘What do you make of them?’ His voice was a murmur. Giuli shrugged.
‘They’re stoned, but she isn’t, not yet. She wants to be one of them; I guess if she’s not doing drugs now, she will eventually.’
Sandro chewed his lip, trying to work out what he would say to the Bellagamba family.
‘Saw Luisa on my way over,’ said Giuli. ‘Having lunch with the boss, it looked like.’
‘What?’ said Sandro.
Her face flicked upwards. ‘Hi,’ she said, not to Sandro.
Sandro looked around. A dark man in a grey leather jacket was smiling down at them without a trace of warmth. Sandro struggled to extract himself from the cushions and into a more dignified attitude, and failed.
‘Ciao,’ said the man in a thick accent and sat down beside Giuli, a hand immediately on her knee. He wasn’t North African, but something
else. Eastern European? Turkish? From somewhere where cultures met, and went to war. There was something in his other hand, something he was clicking and shifting, like worry beads: Sandro couldn’t see it. Giuli kept smiling.
‘New members?’ They nodded.
‘Where you from? You from the city? How come I never see you before?’
‘Tavarnuzze,’ said Giuli without missing a beat, and he winked at her, picking at his teeth with a long and dirty nail. ‘Country girl,’ he said, ‘I know the country girls.’ He flicked something to the floor.
He thought Giuli was one of the prostitutes who worked the back roads out towards Siena. Not far from the mark; Giuli’s mother had done just that, though when Giuli had been a hooker she’d chosen a different pitch. It was a remark that might have made the old Giuli, the Giuli who didn’t care much if she lived or died, the Giuli just out of rehab and as tender and exposed as a clam, fly at the man, hissing and spitting.
All she did was wag a finger at him, smiling.
‘OK, OK,’ he said. ‘Peace, peace. Live and let live.’ And suddenly he was on his feet and Sandro could see that the thing he was clicking and swinging in his left hand was a set of handcuffs. He saw Sandro unable to look away, and laughed again, loud, delighted. Then he was clattering down the stairs.
Sandro gave her a nod. ‘You’re a cool customer, Giuli.’
‘You think?’ She shrugged. ‘You just have to tell yourself, there’s no right way to go. If they want to hurt you, they’ll hurt you.’
Sandro laughed shortly. He took a deep breath.
‘You saw Luisa,’ he said roughly. ‘Having lunch.’
Giuli eyed him curiously. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘In that bar next to her shop, you know. The fancy one.’
OK, thought Sandro, trying to be casual. Standing at the bar, a quick bite. Fair enough.
‘Looked like they were having fun,’ Giuli went on. ‘Nice to see Luisa having fun again. And eating.’
‘Yes,’ said Sandro. ‘Eating a proper meal?’
‘
Scaloppina
with mushrooms, it looked like to me,’ said Giuli wistfully. ‘Nice to have a boss who appreciates you, not just a tramezzino at the bar. Table with a tablecloth, glass of wine.’
Despite himself, Sandro let out an explosive sound. Thinking of Luisa pushing away her glass at the table last night.
‘What?’ said Giuli. ‘What is up with you, Sandro?’
He scratched his head, blinking down at his hands. It felt as though there was a great weight on him, bearing down. Months of tension; months of waiting for it to lift, when they got the all-clear, but then there was always something else. Another test in eighteen months, then two years. Had he thought it would bind them, this fear? It hadn’t.
‘Sandro,’ said Giuli, ‘what’s this all about?’
He raised his face to hers, saw the worry in her eyes and out it came.
‘New York?’ said Giuli, incredulously. ‘Luisa, in New York? You never said.’
‘I didn’t know,’ said Sandro, then hurriedly, ‘I guess it was lastminute. Maybe – someone else dropped out.’
‘Look,’ said Giuli, and he could see in her eyes she knew what he was thinking. Or did she know something else? ‘I can handle this. You need to go home and talk to Luisa.’ She stared at him, glanced over at Carlotta in the corner. ‘I can handle this. You know I can. She’s going Sunday night? You’d better sort this out, Sandro.’
He gazed at her, knowing when he was beaten.
‘Go home.’
S
HE SAW THEM COMING up through the woods in the fading light; at first she didn’t know who she was looking at, just the slow-moving outline of something denser than the leafless trees.
It was an unfamiliar angle, the view down the hill through the woods; Cate might have been in the little room behind the gatehouse once or twice, but she wouldn’t have had time to stand at the window gazing. In the summer, the leaf canopy would have made the dense woodland impenetrable and you might come right up to the castle unnoticed. On a winter evening the effect was no less spooky, though; the screen of spindly, leafless limbs made Cate’s eyes ache the longer she stared at it.
The room was smaller than she remembered it, and the woods were closer. Its smell was a layering of wood, red cotto wax and disinfectant; an anonymous smell. She’d make it her own; it wouldn’t be the first time.
Mauro had taken the long and ugly route to Pozzo, using the dual carriageway. Cate only realized later, when they came the usual way, that he’d been avoiding the crash site. There were plenty of things that weren’t occurring to Cate today; she felt slightly stunned, on autopilot.
It hadn’t taken her long to clean out her bedsit over the biker bar; half a dozen books, some clothes, a couple of pots. Her radio, which
doubled as a speaker for her iPod. She shouldn’t have been surprised by how little affection she felt for the place; it was so easy to say goodbye. But then that was Cate all over, her mother would say. Drifter. She knew she should speak to Vincenzo; she could have called in on him at the supermarket, only Mauro was waiting for her. That was her excuse, anyway; she’d call him – later. When she’d got back to where she’d left him and the pick-up, she’d found it empty but unlocked, and started loading alone. When Mauro had reappeared, close to ten minutes later, she’d been on her knees in the back, sorting stuff, and hadn’t seen what direction he’d come from. He’d looked flushed.
‘Where’ve you been then?’ Cate had said, never one to mince her words. He might have nipped off for a quick coffee, but his general air of shamefacedness had told a different story. ‘One for the road?’
He’d drawn himself up stiffly. Mauro was a countryman, through and through, and old-fashioned: he didn’t like lip from girls.
‘You done?’ was all he’d said, roughly.
Once back with him in the stifling cab of the pick-up, though, breathing in sweat and stale cigarettes, Cate had kept quiet. She didn’t want to get on the wrong side of Mauro, particularly not when he was at the wheel. She’d been driven by him on several occasions, and his style was forceful and headlong, rarely braking on roads he must have known his whole life. And now the light had been leaching out of the sky, the sun close to the horizon and the road ahead of them grey and indistinct, especially in the valleys.
They’d come past the bend, and he’d slowed, kept to the centre of the road. Cate’s head had turned despite herself: the truck was gone, the car too. Just some churned mud and a flash of tape to show where they’d been. Without even looking Mauro had spoken contemptuously. ‘She’s not the first to take that bend too fast,’ he’d said, his jaw set as he ground the gears. ‘She won’t be the last. That’s what I said to the police.’
‘They talked to you?’ Cate had simultaneously tried to absorb the viciousness in his voice and to process the possibility that Mauro had been interviewed by the police. She’d doubted that they would have found the experience rewarding.
He’d grunted. ‘Ginevra made them coffee in the kitchen so, of course, we had a chat. I’ve known Commissario Grasso since he was a boy, and the other one too.’
Very cosy. But when Cate had arrived, they’d all pretended they didn’t know anything, hadn’t they? All right, Cate had thought, if that’s the way you want it. She’d felt that the journey might never come to an end, she might be stuck in this dirty cab with Mauro and his sweet grappa breath forever.
‘The car went into the river?’ she’d asked. The pick-up had slewed on the gravel as he turned on to the back drive, and Mauro had grunted an affirmative. He hadn’t spoken again.
The boxes were stacked in the room behind her now: she’d carried them up herself. Mauro had other things to do; she wouldn’t have asked him even if he had hung around, but Luca had come out of his office to meet her and Mauro had stomped off towards the kitchen without a backward glance, leaving them to it.
At first she’d thought it might be Mauro she saw coming up through the darkening trees, his stocky outline, hunched with temper, still in her thoughts, but quickly she saw that it could not be him. Apart from anything else, it would have been difficult for him to get around the castle to the bottom of the hill in time, even supposing he had barely paused to conduct whatever business he had in the kitchen. There were two figures, moving slowly, stopping and starting, neither with anything of Mauro’s distinctive, stamping gait about them.
Two women, as physically unlike as two women could be. Tina, the pale-skinned girl from Florida with poker-straight, colourless hair, upright and slender to the point of emaciation, and Michelle the New Yorker, strong, muscular, fierce, her grey-blonde hair stuffed into a beanie. Michelle was wearing a parka with a fur hood, short leggings and trainers; this was her uniform. Tina was in the loose Japanese trousers she often wore – not warm enough, and they made her look even thinner; she had little flat oriental gym shoes on her feet, small like everything else about her. Her hands were in her pockets, shoulders tense. The two women leant into each other for support, an
awkward, slow-moving arrangement, neither of them constructed for co-operation, thought Cate, and they kept stopping.
When they were less than twenty metres from the castle they stopped again, and Cate saw that it wasn’t so much that Michelle was comforting Tina, as restraining her. Tina’s movements were jerky; she was pulling at her hair. She was hysterical. Then Michelle put two arms up to Tina’s shoulders and held her still, looking into the younger woman’s face. Cate tentatively took a step closer to the window, hands up to the glass; she hadn’t turned the light on in the room yet and the two women below her were illuminated by the soft yellow of a carriage lamp attached to the wall of the castle. She could hear Michelle’s harsh accent as she said,
No way, baby. It’s not your fault
.
Get a grip
. Then Tina tilted her head sideways and suddenly she was looking straight up at the window where Cate stood.
Instinctively Cate took a step back, but not before she saw that Tina’s face was puffy with tears; swollen as though she’d been crying – or raging – for some time. When a moment later Cate stepped back to the window, the woods beyond the soft semicircle of light were quite dark, and the two women were gone.
As she stood there in the darkened room it felt to Cate as though she was marooned, the castle her chilly, unknowable island. With something like homesickness she thought of Pozzo, its avenues of dusty trees, its run-down station, its sleepy bars; she thought of her bedsit and Vincenzo on the till at the supermarket.
Getting out her mobile, Cate gazed at the screen and its image of her and Vincenzo, little V’cenz, cheeks pressed against each other, on that outing to Rimini at the end of the summer. She knew she should phone him, but she didn’t want to get into it; she didn’t want to hear the little boy in his voice. With a dextrousness born of long practice her thumb darted across the keyboard and she flicked off a message to him.
Sorry
, caro,
stopping at the castle tonight, they need me here
.
Call later?
Because Ginevra needed her in the kitchen – she’d made sure Cate knew it too and didn’t get above her station – and dinner would be at seven. She didn’t know if she’d be eating it or serving it or both, but she had to be there; she didn’t have time to placate Vincenzo, nor to
explain the new situation to him, to talk baby talk and tell him she loved him.
She stared at the phone, willing the message on its way: like so many things in the castle, the mobile signal was unreliable, subject to mysterious fluctuations.
Message sent
, it said.
Still in darkness, the room suddenly felt cold; Cate could feel the deep chill of the castle settling in at her back. The grand, draughty apartments, the second floor where the Englishman would be sitting and staring out across the winter fields, writing nothing, and the Norwegian would be stamping around, pulling down his big old books and leaving them scattered on the floor. Tina should be hunched intently over her work table ornamenting her pots with weird things she picked up around the grounds, hairballs and dust and pins and bottletops, only she was sobbing on Michelle’s shoulder. Tina, the most private, contained person Cate had ever come across.
It came to Cate that these people, whom she had until today lumped together as customers, another set of foreigners who would be gone in a month and never seen again, were suddenly, in the aftermath of Loni Meadows’s death, more real and distinct to her than her own family. She felt a sudden, urgent need to understand them.
And now they’d all be converging on the great cold library that sucked all the heat from its radiators, gathering again for the
aperitivo
, a niggardly few bottles of prosecco, ready-mixed Campari soda and perhaps some spirits. Every night as Ginevra went into the storeroom she complained of how much the guests drank; Michelle for one might be late up for coffee, but every evening she was bang on time for the
aperitivo
.
‘I’ll brief you properly tomorrow,’ Luca had said, meeting her out of the pick-up in the dusk, a sideways glance at Mauro. They’d never really got on, she realized; like her, Luca was an outsider, and Mauro’s surly intractability didn’t yield, even under the full warm glow of his attention. As he’d watched the gardener slope off through the trees towards the shed where he kept his tools and his ride-on, Luca had looked weary in the grey light, not glowing at all. Loni Meadows’s death seemed to have crept into every corner of the place, clammy as fog.
‘Just – keep everyone happy, for the time being,’ he’d said in the quiet dusk. ‘I don’t know how much time I’m going to have – for all that.’ And so, reluctantly closing the door on the warm safety of her new accommodation, Cate had headed for the main keep.
When she walked into the library there was no sign of Luca, but Per the Norwegian was there, muffled up in a padded corduroy jacket and a scarf, drinking whisky at the side window. He was looking out of the window; he showed no sign of being aware of Cate’s arrival, and she turned to check that everything was in order for the
aperitivo
.
‘They’ll complain,’ Luca had said beside the pick-up. She’d been surprised to hear anything but enthusiasm in his voice; a sign of strain. ‘Believe me, whatever the circumstances they’ll find something to complain about, the size of the olives, too much salt, not enough salt, no soda. You’d think they were paying.’ Not bitterness perhaps, just disappointment.
The drinks had been laid out, presumably by Nicki, although she must have scuttled directly back to the kitchen: she believed the library to be haunted, some ancient story of a faithless Orfeo wife walled up alive. As well as the whisky there was Campari, a separate bottle of soda, a small bowl of ice, pasteurized orange juice, six bottles of prosecco and two of red wine. Ginevra had obviously been leaned on to be generous, under the circumstances.
‘Where do you think it happened?’ came Per’s flat voice from the window, without preamble, and Cate started. Had she dreamt it, his bellowing like a calf down the stairwell? She stared at him, and he looked back; there was something dull in his eyes.
‘Down by the river,’ she said hesitantly, chilled all over again by the heedlessness with which she’d sped past the tow-truck. The body might have still been there, mightn’t it? Behind the red and white tape, flickering in the wind, under a little tent, waiting to be taken away. ‘Not far.’
Per nodded, and she smelled the whisky as he raised the glass to his lips.
Had he been drunk, this morning? She tried to remember the precise quality of that shout: wounded, belligerent? It was extraordinary.
Cate had always thought of him as a comfortable, solid presence; in the evenings at dinner in the early weeks he had enjoyed the company of guests, jovial then, an attentive listener, modest and serious. It occurred to her now that gradually he had grown ever quieter. She had guessed that he missed his wife; he’d been married to a Spanish woman for twenty-five years, he once told her. Yolanda.
Perhaps he’d been bellowing about his own wife. Perhaps he’d woken from a bad dream.
He wasn’t talking now, and as he turned away from her, Cate was wondering if anyone, apart from her, had been into the
Dottoressa
’s room yet. Then from the gallery came the sound of a throat being cleared. Cate jumped. Glancing up in the dim light she could just about discern the narrow face, deep-set eyes and unshaven chin of the Englishman. It was Alec Fairhead, gazing down at her, a book open in his hand. She tilted her head back to look at him; Per stared through the window and resumed his contemplation of the darkness.
‘Hello,’ she said. ‘Mr Fairhead.’ And she remembered the day he’d arrived, looking like he wanted to get straight back in the car; remembered Loni Meadows standing in front of them holding out her hand and saying,
We are honoured
, with that sarcastic edge to her voice.

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