A Murder in Tuscany (9 page)

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Authors: Christobel Kent

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BOOK: A Murder in Tuscany
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Cate had set out the tray of brandy and liqueurs, and Per and Alec Fairhead had poured themselves big slugs in silence; it was only after his third, or maybe fourth, that Per had sat up and said something, his voice ragged. The first thing he’d said all through dinner. ‘Where was she going? Does anyone know where she was going?’
At the door, Cate hadn’t been able to see their faces in the sudden silence. Then Michelle had said, ‘Jeez, Per. We all know. Don’t we?’ And there’d been movement then, clearing of throats and chairs moving. Their cue to go.
Under the table collecting crumbs and warm with the effort, Cate sat back on her haunches and for the first time she really thought about what Mauro and Ginevra had said.
She deserved it.
Really? Did they really think that? What could Loni Meadows have done to deserve to die? Smashed to pieces; Cate closed her eyes as she thought about that. Her face, all bruised and broken. The long, delicate fingers, the fine ankles, caught in a horrible snarl of metal and rubber. The life leaving her; how long would it have taken? Face down in the river, or face pressed against the frozen earth.
Where had she been going? On the road to Pozzo Basso. Even Cate knew Loni Meadows made regular, late-night visits to Pozzo, Thursdays, Fridays, returning at all hours. And once, early one morning a month or so back, Cate herself had seen the Monster in town, parked outside a hotel.
Tiziano had been the last to leave, as he often was; Cate supposed the wheelchair must have taught him patience. She’d noticed over the weeks that he liked the others to go ahead of him out of most situations; she assumed because he didn’t like feeling he was getting in the way, blocking the door, people exchanging words over his head. Though he never showed it.
She thought somehow, though, that the night of Loni’s death he had not been the last to go. Had he been upset by something too? Had he been tired? She couldn’t remember.
‘Am I keeping you up?’ he’d asked gently, there in the dining room. Cate supposed she might have yawned; certainly at that point she’d been thinking longingly of her bed.
She’d shaken her head, with a sleepy laugh. ‘It’s been a long day.’
‘You’re telling me,’ Tiziano had said. ‘And you’re a late bird at the best of times, I know you. Always another little job to get done. It’ll be even worse now you’re living in, won’t it? Always on duty.’ He’d held out a hand, taken hers. ‘Don’t work yourself too hard, sweetheart.’
Cate had felt embarrassed and pleased at the same time, shaking her head. ‘I’m lazy, really,’ she’d said. ‘You should see me when the alarm goes off.’
He’d rested his eyes on her then, the hint of a smile at the corner of his lips. ‘What time did you get to bed last night?’ he’d said. ‘You didn’t leave here till gone eleven.’
‘Didn’t I?’ She’d looked at her toes.
Getting to her feet in the dining room, which was now pristine, even by Ginevra’s exacting standards, Cate flushed at the memory.
So Tiziano kept an eye on her, did he?
She thought of the Venetian sitting at the window of the apartment that had been modified for him, on the ground floor. Sound-proofed, with a piano, ramps and a customized bathroom. Sitting at the window and watching.
She had indeed left at about eleven. The dining room had been empty, Ginevra and Nicki gone. Why did it suddenly seem important to Cate to get those things straight? Loni Meadows had died in a car accident, simple as that.
But it had been her last night on earth, and it had to matter.
And now Cate wondered if there was anyone out there asking questions about Loni Meadows’s death, or if she was going to have to ask them herself.
 
 
By the time Luca Gallo phoned him back, somewhere around nine in the morning, Sandro was one coffee down, the paper open in front of him, and he already knew what the man was going to say.
If Luisa had been there, she’d have made him explain; she’d have helped him sort his thoughts.
‘
What
do you know, exactly?’
She would have challenged him, looking over his shoulder at the newspaper spread out in front of them. They’d be sitting at the kitchen table together; he’d have gone out early for the paper and some pastries, Luisa would have had coffee going on the stove, ready for his return.
This is all wrong
, Sandro would have said, not meaning him and Luisa because in an ideal world that conversation last night would never have happened. No, he’d have tapped the paper and said,
This is all wrong. I knew something funny was going on, back then, last summer.
He was hungry, but he didn’t feel like eating.
Luisa and he hadn’t exchanged a word this morning. When Sandro had got back at nearly three in the morning from following Carlotta
Bellagamba safely home to Galluzzo, let himself quietly into the apartment and come to bed, Luisa’s overnight bag had been inside the bedroom door, packed and ready to go, even though she wasn’t leaving for New York until Monday morning.
When Luisa left for work, close to eight, Sandro had been lying silent in the bed, feigning sleep; it seemed to him that if he didn’t know what to say to her, he’d be best not saying anything at all. But he couldn’t sleep, however much he needed it; as he lay there a hundred questions pressed in on him. The nagging, insinuating ones about Luisa’s trip (
Why didn’t she tell me before? How long has she known? Has she got a visa
,
is her passport up to date?
) he pushed aside, but others crowded in on him. And what most of them boiled down to was simple: was he ever going to be any good at this?
So, within minutes of the door closing behind Luisa, Sandro was out of bed, his head thumping, and by 8.30 he was in the Oltrarno. Not for him this morning the marble and glass of Rivoire, and the knowing glances of the barmen and Luisa just around the corner. He had texted Giuli to tell her he was sitting in a dingy bar called the Caffè Medici, off the Piazza Santo Spirito, not far from Giuli’s rooms in the Via della Chiesa. It was a place where no one would come up to Sandro, clap him on the shoulder and ask how Luisa was. At the bar one of the square’s glassy-eyed and shivering addicts gulped
caffè latte
, and in his booth Sandro was reading
La Nazione
.
The story was on page three, accompanied by two photographs. Sandro read it once, twice, then a third time, moving his lips at certain words, and finally he laid the paper flat on the table.
The fifty-five-year-old woman found dead in the wreckage of her car in a ravine in the province of Grosseto yesterday morning has been identified as Dottoressa Leona Meadows-Mascarello, Director of the Orfeo Trust’s celebrated Creative Arts Program, based for twenty-two years in the Castello Orfeo. American-born Dottoressa Meadows-Mascarello, who was apparently the car’s only occupant, had been the program’s director for seven months. She was married to Giuliano Mascarello, the well-known human
rights lawyer based in Florence, who has been informed of his wife’s demise. It is thought that the accident occurred in the early hours of Friday morning, and no other vehicle has so far been traced in connection with the incident.’
In Sandro’s head something shifted, turned, presented itself to him. An old trick his brain had learned over decades of police work, a trick of information retrieval; you think a case is dead and gone and never mattered much anyway, but when required that little drawer in the brain’s filing cabinet pops open, just like that. When he first received the message yesterday morning that Gallo had called, he’d have had trouble telling anyone the name of the employee he’d been hired by the Orfeo Trust to do a background check on. Now he could have told the bored-looking barman of the Medici – at present trying to eject the
latte
-drinking junkie – the woman’s birthday; he could have told him the colour of her eyes.
Leona Meadows, known as Loni, architect; sculptor in mixed media; cultural critic. Born 4 July 1952, Topeka, Kansas. Studied architecture at Columbia University and the Sorbonne, Paris, arrived Florence 1972 to study for a doctorate in Fine Art at the Accademia di Belle Arti, married Giuliano Mascarello 1979, Visiting Fellowship at the Courtauld Institute, London, 1981 – 2, and Fashion Institute of Technology, New York, 2000 – 2001. Work exhibited San Francisco, Rome, Florence, Nice, London. Excellent credit rating, clean driving licence, no bankruptcy proceedings pending, no criminal record. No children.
Died 22 February 2008.
Eyes: blue.
What had he learned about her? Only what he’d been asked to learn, that her CV, that all her references, dates and qualifications checked out, all the institutions she said she’d attended had records of her attendance, all the galleries named had in fact exhibited her work when she said they had. That her eyes were indeed blue; the one superfluous judgement Sandro had made, in fact, looking at the passport-sized photograph attached to the sheaf of papers sent to him by Luca Gallo last summer, was that Loni Meadows’s eyes were the most mesmerizingly blue that he’d ever seen.
The credit check and criminal records he’d put through on the sly, calling in favours among his ex-colleagues at Porta al Prato. People did it all the time.
She died perhaps thirty hours ago, mused Sandro; so Luca Gallo, the Administrator of the Orfeo Trust, had called Sandro practically the moment he found out about the
Dottoressa
’s death.
All right
, Sandro said to himself,
something’s going on here
.
If Luisa had been there – but she wasn’t, was she? And for the first time in weeks, perhaps months, in chemical response to the challenge Sandro felt the knot in his gut unclench, just fractionally.
There’s something here
.
And it was then that Luca Gallo called; they spoke for approximately five minutes: having a better idea from the newspaper article of what this would be about, Sandro felt that his questions could wait. They arranged to meet at 10.30, at an address north of Santa Croce. Sandro hung up, then immediately dialled Carlotta Bellagamba’s father. It didn’t take long.
‘Hey, boss.’ The voice was cheerful, hoarse with lack of sleep; Giuli’s voice. He looked up to see her at the bar, unbuttoning her coat, ordering coffee with a nod to the barman. ‘This is my local, how’d you know?’
He hadn’t known. ‘Bit of a change of plan, Giuli,’ he said.
S
TANDING UNDER THE TREES, Cate watched Luca Gallo leave, the car’s exhaust fumes clouding in the freezing air. All around her the landscape was silent, white with frost, and overhead the sky was still a lovely pale violet-blue.
At her back stood the towering grey bulk of the castle, watching for the approach of its enemies. From the top floor, thought Cate, you might be able to see as far as the river; you might be able to see down into that dip where Loni Meadows had died. Luca’s car was out of sight now.
Cate was in charge. It was a kind of joke, wasn’t it? As if she could be in charge of that lot in the kitchen, whispering and bickering and falling silent when she appeared. Not to mention the guests. But she had to take it seriously, even if they didn’t. Luca trusted her.
When she had finished in the dining room earlier, Cate had hesitated at the kitchen door, apron in hand; she had been able to hear raised voices.
‘Where was she off to, that’s what I’d like to know.’ Ginevra; her hands would be on her hips, lower lip stuck out.
‘Off to the fancy man in Pozzo.’ Mauro.
‘What fancy man?’ Nicki, dozy as ever; the others had all laughed at that.
Suddenly Cate hadn’t wanted to listen any more, and she certainly hadn’t wanted to open the door and have them all stare. She’d stuffed the apron in a drawer of the sideboard and left by the garden door.
She had crossed the frosted grass to the terrace where in summer the guests ate under a pergola, out through the hedge and round to the pretty brick gatehouse where Luca’s office and apartment were. An unfamiliar little black car with a hire company logo on the driver’s door had been parked on the gravel outside it. As she’d approached, the office door had opened and Luca had come out, carrying a stack of files; Cate had been startled to see that he was wearing a suit. She’d never seen him in anything but checked shirt and combat trousers, not even yesterday, when he had stood in front of them all in the dining room and told them the Director was dead.
‘Caterina,’ Luca had said, and sighed. ‘Yes. Just a minute.’ He’d locked the door and given her the key. ‘I’m sorry about yesterday, Cate. I spent the whole evening on the phone, talking to the office in Baltimore. About advertising for a new Director, about arranging a new intern.’
‘Oh,’ Cate had said, surprised by the fact she hadn’t felt particularly disappointed.
‘It’s all right,’ he’d said, with a faint smile. ‘I told them there’s no need for the time being. I told them you were an absolute treasure, and we need to hang on to you.’
Cate had smiled back uncomfortably. He’d patted her on the shoulder. ‘I’ve got to go to Florence. Just for the morning, I hope. There’s someone I’ve got to see.’
‘Yes?’
He’d frowned, and she’d seen he was pondering how much he needed to tell her. ‘Ah, a couple of people, actually.’ He’d taken a deep breath. ‘I need to see Dottoressa Meadows’s husband.’
‘He doesn’t know yet?’ Cate had been horrified.
‘Oh, yes,’ Luca had replied grimly, ‘he knows. He – well. There are things that need to be discussed.’
‘I see,’ Cate had said, knowing when to shut up.
‘You can manage, for the morning? Perhaps until early afternoon. There was a trip to Pienza planned for today, but I have cancelled the
minibus; I assume no one will expect to be going. The guests will need to be told, of course; can you do that at the coffee assembly?’ He’d looked at his watch. ‘In half an hour? I really must go now.’
‘Of course,’ Cate had said, thinking of how little she wanted to see their averted, unhappy faces, or to pretend to be in charge.
‘Just a few hours,’ Gallo had said, as if he’d read her thoughts. ‘I’ll be back by mid-afternoon, at the latest.’
And the little black car with the logo on its door had gone.
Cate’s phone jumped in her pocket; she had it on silent these days. It seemed more professional. Without getting it out, she knew it would be Vincenzo.
 
 
The library was empty when she laid out the coffee, and Cate wondered whether the guests might not bother to come at all today.
But when she returned ten minutes later with Ginevra’s hard-baked
cantucci
– there’d be lawsuits one day, Luca had warned, holding his jaw and laughing, when someone finally broke a tooth on one – Tiziano was there, his chair parked by the long window. He could just see out; the sills were low enough here. She wondered how he kept his temper, sometimes; if she was in a wheelchair she’d always be raging at what she couldn’t do. She came up to him with the plate of biscuits, and looking out of the window she could see Michelle and Tina wrapped up in padded coats on the grass, each with a cup of coffee.
‘Probably warmer out there,’ said Tiziano ruefully, looking up at her.
‘I can wheel you out, if you like,’ said Cate quickly.
He shrugged. ‘I could do it myself, if I wanted,’ he said calmly, giving her a level look. ‘I’m pretty good in this thing, you know.’
He was too, she’d seen him flying down the lanes, faster than most pedestrians. Someone said he’d been in the last Paralympics. Basketball.
‘Oh, I didn’t mean – I know – ’ She felt her eyes prick and grow hot.
Calm down, she thought, crying is ridiculous. This whole business was getting to her. Her mother would say with wheezy dismissal,
Of course
,
you’re no good at responsibility
,
Caterina Giottone
,
you’re just
like your father
.
All this free spirit business
,
it’s all very well
.
You need something to tether you
.
Vincenzo was trying to tether her. He’d sounded angry, though to be fair to him, he’d sounded like he was also trying to control it. ‘But what exactly is going on?’ he’d asked, disgruntled. She’d explained.
‘It’s a dangerous road,’ he’d said, sobered. ‘And this time of year too.
Madonna
.’ There’d been a pause. ‘Are you upset?’
Cate had thought about it. ‘A bit,’ she’d said. ‘I’m OK.’
‘You liked her, didn’t you?’
She’d been taken aback at that. ‘I suppose I did, yes,’ she’d eventually replied. ‘She was a bitch, actually, but yes. I did like her.’
Tiziano was looking at her. Did I really say that, she wondered? She
had
been a bitch, though; it hadn’t really occurred to Cate until she’d gone; she hadn’t dared say it. Did I like her, though? Admired, maybe, grudgingly respected, and when she was being funny, at the dining table, when she held everyone in the palm of her hand with some story or other – yes. Liked her.
‘I just meant, if you want the company,’ she now said to Tiziano, recovering herself.
‘Actually, I prefer it in here, this morning,’ said Tiziano meditatively, looking down at Michelle and Tina. ‘Those two – well. They can get a bit much, together. A pair of Gothic witches, casting spells.’
Cate knew she shouldn’t agree; she smiled in the gloom. ‘Mm-hm,’ she said. ‘I saw Tina crying. Michelle was – I suppose she was comforting her.’ She hesitated. ‘Are they – um – a couple, do you think?’
Tiziano drew his head back in mock surprise, then took pity. ‘No, Not a couple.’ It occurred to Cate that she could ask him anything, and he would know the answer. Sitting in that wheelchair, his brain whirring, all that time to watch and learn.
‘What, then?’ she said. Could she trust him not to tell Luca she was asking inappropriate questions? She thought she could. Too late now, anyway.
‘Well,’ said Tiziano, ‘I’d have said Tina is only interested in her work. Human relationships are not her thing. Not entirely healthy – but then, artists often aren’t. Even the able-bodied ones.’
‘But she was crying,’ said Cate obstinately.
Tiziano shrugged. ‘Loni was in the same field, wasn’t she? A sculptor, once upon a time, before she became a critic. Maybe they bonded over it.’
Cate looked at him, not quite buying it; wondering if they all knew as much about each other’s careers as Tiziano seemed to. He’d been doing his homework. ‘And Michelle?’
‘Michelle’s main emotion is rage, wouldn’t you say?’ Tiziano cocked his head up at Cate, his eyes alive with interest. ‘Anger, not love. Though I don’t think she’s always been that way.’
Just like she’d once been beautiful too. Cate nodded, and together they looked down at the women. ‘I think she must be fond of Tina, though,’ she said.
‘There’s a bond,’ said Tiziano. ‘Sure. Maybe thwarted maternal love. Maybe Michelle should have taken a different path, gone out to a farmhouse in Woodstock or somewhere and had babies. What good is art, anyway? All that poring over a desk, thinking of words.’ He sounded almost angry himself. ‘What for? Who reads Michelle’s poems? She told me her last book sold 1,000 copies, worldwide. The music lovers, the people who come to listen to me, with their smug, snobbish educated faces, do they matter? Sometimes I want to wheel the chair as fast as I can off the stage and launch myself on to the front row, just to see their faces.’
‘You don’t really think that,’ said Cate.
He lifted his cup blithely to his lips, and gave her no clue as to whether he was joking. ‘Perhaps I don’t,’ he said, and he smiled.
Outside on the grass Tina had set her own cup down on the wooden garden table, where in the summer the guests might sit and watch the sun go down. Her hair seemed flatter and straighter and more colourless than ever; her lips blanched. Her shoulders were hunched and her hands wringing each other in the cold. She bobbed her head, and Michelle gave her a brusque nod back, and Tina hurried away towards the studio. Tiziano was right; Michelle’s whole body language, as she stood there with her arms wrapped around herself and watched Tina go, was of tightly
wound fury. And when she turned and looked up at the window her face was set.
‘But why is she so angry?’ She turned to him, took his empty cup gently from him.
‘Ah, that,’ said Tiziano, and he looked away. ‘It’s – well. You should ask her that.’
Cate laughed. ‘Ask Michelle? Are you crazy?’
‘Not me,’ said Tiziano. He spun the chair and wheeled back to the table.
Cate persisted. ‘Do you know?’ From the foot of the stairs came the creak of the outside door opening. Michelle. ‘Is it the children thing?’ And having thought it was a bizarre suggestion of Tiziano’s, suddenly she could quite imagine Michelle a mother, the angry kind, the kind prone to sudden, tender outbursts and fierce hugs.
‘Not unconnected, maybe,’ said Tiziano, not attempting to lower his voice. ‘But not exactly. She married late, and was widowed early. She was widowed last year. Her husband was a composer; they’d applied to come here together.’
Cate stared at him, considering what he had just said. This great loss she had not known about. And then there was Michelle in the doorway, and at the sight of Tiziano her glowering face relaxed, almost into a smile. ‘Hey, baby,’ she said gruffly.
‘I’ve told you not to call me that,’ said Tiziano, winking at her.
‘I think I’ll take some coffee upstairs,’ said Cate.
And left them to it.
 
 
Luca Gallo had nominated a members’ club in a narrow street near the market of San Ambrogio for their meeting, declining Sandro’s offer of his own offices. Sandro had accepted the choice of venue without demur, offices being a rather grand term for two rooms in San Frediano with a view of a builders’ merchants; perhaps Gallo had guessed as much.
Pondering this possibility, Sandro found himself wondering for the first time why Gallo had ever selected him for the job of checking up on Dottoressa Loni Meadows, when the job might easily have
been done by one of the bigger and more anonymous agencies with a smarter address. Perhaps it was a matter of discretion – Sandro was certainly discreet – or of a preference for an old-fashioned way of doing things. Or perhaps, thought Sandro, eyeing the spiffed-up staff of the members’ club with suspicion as he waited in its panelled lobby, ten minutes early as he always was for everything, perhaps he was being paranoid.
As it was, the club was not far from Sandro and Luisa’s flat, even if the reason Gallo had given for suggesting the place was that it was just around the corner from the offices of Loni Meadows’s husband – now widower – Giuliano Mascarello. And they would be proceeding from the club to those offices.
It had been a crisp, cold morning when he had set out from home, not quite as luminous and blue as yesterday, but as he crossed the river, the light had fallen gold on the soft yellow of the Palazzo Corsini’s façade, and Sandro had almost allowed himself to imagine spring. Only then it had come to him painfully that under normal circumstances he would have been imagining a trip up the coast with Luisa for Easter, perhaps, the azaleas blooming along the motorway’s central reservation, a picnic in the boot. And now, the possibility of the new season had retreated anyway; the sky had thickened and clouded, and the wind was bitter as he headed up the narrow canyon of the Borgo Pinti, towards the Circolo Boheme.

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