Death of a Showgirl (16 page)

He looked across at me sharply, as if he didn’t understand the question. I repeated it, and he gave a faint nod. ‘That’s where they said she would be. I told Chiara to go round there and sort it out. I always thought something had happened to her, but here she is.’

‘This is Simona,’ I said slowly. ‘This is Chiara’s daughter. Your daughter.’

‘Eh?’

He was completely confused now about who was sitting at his bedside. And yet he seemed lucid about the distant past. It was as if he couldn’t understand where he was now – lying above the trapdoor to eternity – but was able to recall precise details from long ago. I looked at him once more. He was sitting there, still gripping the sheets. His skin was pale but bruised, with soggy veins like converging rivers on his thin arms.

I got up to go, leaving him alone with Simona. The old woman followed me out into the corridor.

‘Is this true?’ she asked. ‘Is that girl really his?’

I just nodded, not wanting to tell her the whole sordid story.

‘What does she want?’ she asked with suspicion.

‘Nothing. Just to see her father once before he dies.’

‘That’s it?’

‘Wouldn’t you?’

I peered round the door to look at Simona and Gregori. They were sitting there in silence. It looked like he had fallen asleep again. I walked back in, put a hand on her shoulder and suggested we leave. She stayed where she was, looking at him the way a mother watches a sleeping baby.

When we got up to go, he opened his eyes. Simona took his hand and squeezed it. Then she leant forward and kissed him on the forehead. She was crying as we walked back towards the car.

Chiara was sitting on a bench outside the block of flats when we got there. She stood up immediately when she saw us and Simona walked over to her, crying again now. They hugged and Chiara looked at me, over her daughter’s shoulder, with reproach.

‘I forgot to ask you one thing,’ I said. She nodded, looking mildly irritated. ‘When was the last time you saw Anna.’

‘Anna?’ She paused. ‘Anna Sartori?’

‘Sure.’

She pulled away from Simona and stood in front of me with her hands on her hips. ‘Can’t you leave us alone now?’

‘One or two more questions and I’ll be gone. When did you last see her? Anna Sartori?’

She stared at me with disgust. Then looked down at the pavement, lost in memories. ‘We met up in some bar shortly after the station had dropped her. She was in pieces. They had been about to give her what she longed for. She was going to get an on-screen role. And then it was all taken away from her by that man.’

‘Mori?’

‘Sure. You know what happened. They dropped her like that. Finished.’

‘And how long was that before she went missing?’

‘A few days.’

‘And then Gregori phoned you to tell you to meet her at the Hotel del Fiume? Told you to talk her out of going public?’

‘No.’ There was a simplicity to her contradiction. No defensiveness, no exaggerated protest.

We looked at each other, trying to gauge something hidden. Simona was watching us, sensing the tension.

‘Gregori said he called you, told you to persuade her not to create a scandal.’

‘No. No he didn’t. I don’t think he ever called me. It wasn’t,’ she said quietly, ‘that sort of relationship.’

‘He never called you about Anna, tried to persuade you to talk to her?’

‘Never.’

I shut my eyes and tried to concentrate. Gregori had seemed surprisingly lucid. He was convincing when recalling the past, like he was almost making a death-bed confession and wanted to express himself clearly. He floated from that clarity into confusion, but I could tell the difference. I knew when he knew what he was talking about, when he didn’t have the energy, or probably the motive, to lie.

‘We’re going inside,’ a voice said from far away. ‘Please leave us in peace to let us rebuild our lives.’

The voice was very familiar, but with my eyes closed it gave me a start. There was an edge of resentment or self-pity in the voice, a certain huskiness brought on by cigarettes or sadness. I opened my eyes and saw Chiara looking at me, holding out her hand as if she wanted to shake and be done with it. Her voice, I realised, sounded almost exactly like her mother’s.

‘Good luck,’ I said, shaking her hand. ‘Look after yourself,’ I said to Simona. I watched them walk along the concrete path together, through the cypresses and into the lobby of the building.

‘Biondi?’ I said into the intercom.

‘Yes.’

‘It’s Castagnetti. It’s time to settle up.’

He buzzed me in, holding open the front door as I walked up the familiar gravel drive. I felt like I was coming for my thirty pieces of silver. I knew what I was about to do, but I needed to be paid first.

He led me into his study, a smart room behind the living room. It was lined with books that looked like they had never been opened. They were there as wallpaper rather than literature. He flicked on a green light above his desk, opened a drawer and took out a chequebook.

‘So,’ he said wearily. ‘How much?’

‘I’ve got a few receipts here. Expenses.’ I passed over a dozen small slips of white paper. ‘Can you do the maths?’

He looked at them with disdain and pulled out a calculator from a drawer. I watched him tapping the numbers in. ‘It’s quite a bargain.’ He started writing, then ripped out the cheque and passed it over. ‘A few hundred euros to lose a daughter.’

‘Simona wasn’t your daughter.’

He stared at me like I was as bad as Mori. ‘You took her away from me.’

‘She took herself away. The same way you took yourself away when Anna was born. That’s what happens in families. Some people decide to leave. You left. Then Simona left. There’s some kind of justice there somewhere.’

‘Get out,’ he said fiercely, standing up and moving round the side of his desk.

‘I’ll say goodbye to your wife first.’

‘She’s sleeping off another session,’ he said.

‘Where?’

‘What do you mean, “where”? She’s asleep.’

I turned to walk out of the study, pacing through the living room and toward the wide staircase.

‘Where are you going?’ he shouted after me.

I took the steps two at a time, not wanting him to reach me before I reached her. I remembered the first floor from when I had first been here, when Chiara and I had looked at young Simona’s room. That room had been on the left, so I turned right, and went into each of the rooms: there was a wardrobe the size of a small room, a luxurious bathroom, an empty bedroom. Eventually I found the woman: she was in a large double bed, propped up on pillows and gently snoring. I could hear Biondi’s footsteps behind me.

‘Signora,’ I said loudly.

She raised her head slowly from her shoulders as I said it again, her eyes still closed. She opened them slowly and fixed them on me, staring without moving. Her face looked stony, as if she had woken up to reality and didn’t like the look of it.

‘I knew you would come,’ she said in an ethereal voice.

‘Why’s that?’

‘I knew when I first saw you that you would be coming after me.’

‘Why would I do that?’

‘Don’t be sly.’ She smiled slightly, one side of her mouth rising minimally into a tired gesture of amusement.

‘What’s going on?’ Biondi barged in, looking at the two of us. Neither of us spoke. ‘What’s all this about?’

‘Why don’t you tell my husband, Mr Castagnetti?’ Her voice was strangely serene, as if she were enjoying this last moment of revelation and the power it gave her over her husband.

‘Your wife,’ I said slowly, staring at her while addressing Biondi, ‘was the last person to see your daughter, Anna Sartori, alive. The last person to see her alive and, I’m guessing, the first person to see her dead.’

I turned to look at him to check that he had understood. His wide, disbelieving eyes were fixed on his wife. From having been weak, she suddenly seemed strong and spirited.

‘Tell him,’ I said to her, bouncing my head towards her husband.

She smiled again, enjoying the endgame. ‘All I did was answer the phone. As soon as I picked it up, a man started telling me that that girl was threatening to go public, to blurt out to the whole world what he and Chiara had been up to and why. I didn’t know what he was talking about, but as he went on I could work it out. Chiara had been paid to . . .’ She couldn’t bring herself to say the words. ‘She had been his little plaything, and now he wanted her to keep everything quiet. He thought I was Chiara. He was urging her to go and talk to Anna, to persuade her to take Di Angelo’s money and run. “Go to the Hotel del Fiume and talk some sense into her,” he kept saying, “otherwise your reputation will be ruined. Your name will be all over the papers and everyone will know what profession you’re in.” I didn’t know what he meant at first, but he made it pretty clear. He was talking so much I barely spoke. And as I was listening I could see Chiara’s future possibilities, all her hopes and ambitions, melting away.

‘That girl,’ she sneered as she said it, her top lip tightening over her teeth, ‘that girl had come into this happy family and turned it upside down. She had taken away your affections, Fausto, and, with Mori’s help, your money. That was all fine. I could live without your money, and I hadn’t seen any affection since soon after Chiara was born. That was all right with me. But then that girl started to take away our daughter.’ She was getting impassioned now, working herself up into a self-righteous temper. ‘At the start of that summer our daughter was a young, innocent girl. She had only just left school. By the end of it she was out until dawn every night, had a drugs habit and was pregnant. That’s what that girl had done to this family.’ She stared at me with wild eyes. ‘I was protecting my daughter. That’s all I was doing. I was protecting my daughter.’

‘By killing mine?’ Biondi was out of control now. His face looked crazy, as if he were capable of anything. ‘All this time you’ve lived here, drinking yourself stupid every day, and all along you knew where my precious little girl was?’

She laughed nastily. ‘Don’t be melodramatic,’ she said. ‘You didn’t care about her before, so why should you care afterwards?’

‘She was my child.’ He still had a manic look about him, but his mania seemed about to melt into self-pity. Like a true egotist, he was sorry for himself, rather than the person he was mourning.

‘How did you do it?’ I asked her.

‘What does it matter?’

I repeated the question and pride got the better of her.

‘I knew where she was going, so I went to meet her. I waited outside that hotel and when she turned up, I invited her to get in the car. I told her that Chiara was round the corner and needed to talk to her. She wasn’t exactly keen, but she got in and as soon as she sat down next to me, I gave her a shot of botulinum toxin. Jabbed it straight into her thigh. You know what that is, Detective? It’s a toxin that often grows on sausages and pâté. That’s where the word botulism comes from. It’s Latin, you see. Latin for sausage.’

There was a nasty superiority to her tone, as if she were enjoying lecturing us about the substance she had used to kill Sartori.

‘I had the stuff for my cerebral palsy patients. In minute doses it can paralyse muscles. That’s its main medicinal purpose. It can be used for people with uncontrollable blinking or strabismus. Nowadays, though, it’s mainly used as a vanity product, as something that helps eradicate lines on ageing ladies. You’ll know it by the name Botox. Funny, isn’t it, that someone in the glamour industry ended up dead because of Botox?

‘Within seconds her pretty face had dropped. Her skin was going dry and pale and her breathing was suddenly uneven. Did I tell you it paralyses the muscles? She was trying to talk, but was only mumbling. Her chin was on her chest as if she were dozing off. Those pretty cheeks had gone a strange grey-blue. I’ll never forget that unnatural, stony colour. In less than a minute anyone looking into the car would have thought she was fast asleep.’

‘What did you do then?’

‘I drove south. Just drove for miles, not knowing what to do. I’d never planned to hurt her, it was just an instinct, a mother’s instinct to protect her own daughter. And suddenly I had this sleeping beauty in the car. I kept driving until I came to a remote bit of coastline near Anzio. It was dusk and there was no one around so I just rolled her out of the car and took her to the cliff edge. I threw her on the ground and rolled her off. I saw her body hit the water and watched it being pulled out to sea. I sat there for an hour or more, watching her float away as the sun sank below the horizon. I still remember the euphoria as I watched her disappear.’

I suddenly saw, behind her drunkard’s exterior, her brutal soul. She was relishing the shock she had caused, not just by her actions but by her attitude to them. Her husband was staring at her as if he were seeing her for the first time, her terrible barrenness laid bare.

‘I’m going to get dressed. I don’t want the Carabinieri to find me like this.’ She swung her legs out from under the covers and shuffled towards the bathroom. She shut the door behind her. I walked over towards her bed and looked out of the window. I doubted she was going to run, but I wanted to check that she wasn’t climbing out of the bathroom window. I pulled up the bedroom window and leant out. There, to my right and surrounded by wisteria, was the bathroom window, shut.

The deafening crack gave me a shock. The bathroom window was suddenly covered in blood. I raced back inside and saw Biondi standing there frozen, breathing heavily. The door to the bathroom was locked. I gave it a shoulder but it wouldn’t budge, so I took a step back and gave it a hard kick with my good foot. The door splintered above the handle and I reached in, found the key and unlocked the door.

She was lying beside the bath, an expanding puddle of dark blood emerging from underneath her head. A stubby, silver pistol was on the floor, under the basin.

I walked out and found Biondi on his hands and knees on the floor. He was hitting his fist against the carpet repetitively. He seemed to be entirely oblivious to my presence.

‘I’m sorry,’ I said quietly. He didn’t look up, but just kept hitting his fist against the floor.

‘First my daughter, now my wife,’ he was whispering to himself.

I took out my phone and called the Carabinieri. I explained what had happened, who Giovanna Biondi was, and what she had done. I gave them the address and hung up.

From the window I could see the traffic and the Tiber, both flowing slowly as normal. Birds were still shrieking and singing incessantly like nothing had happened. The world was unaware that it should have come to a standstill. From a nearby building I could hear the stoked excitement of an afternoon game show. The host was shouting encouragement and the audience were applauding and laughing. It sounded like a cookery contest, like a race against the clock to do something mundane. I suddenly felt very tired.

No crime had been committed here, so I decided to leave before the authorities arrived with their cameras and questions. I patted Biondi’s shoulder and headed out.

The car was hot, and I lowered the window before taking out my phone and finding the number for Anna’s mother. I thumbed the numbers in, wondering what I would say to her if she answered. I heard it ringing and pictured her tripping over her cats as she moved towards the phone. I knew I couldn’t give her the corpse she both dreaded and yet longed for. But at least she would get some kind of conclusion. It was still ringing, the electronic buzz drilling in my ear. Eventually I hung up, turned the key, and headed back north.