Paganini's Ghost (34 page)

“Now wait a minute. Murder? It wasn't murder. I swear it wasn't.”

“No?”

“You've got it all wrong.”

“You admit that you hit him?” Guastafeste said.

“Look, it wasn't what you think. I went there to talk to him, that's all. Just to talk. I didn't want an argument; I didn't want a fight. It was only later I found out. When I heard the news, saw it on the television.”

“You went to Villeneuve's hotel room?”

“But not to kill him. I didn't kill him. It just happened.”

“Why did you go there?”

“To talk to him. That's all I wanted to do: talk.”

“About what?”

“About the Moses box.”

“The gold box with the engraving of Moses on the lid?”

“Yes.”

“How did you know Villeneuve had it?”

“I overheard him at the reception. In Cremona, after Yevgeny Ivanov's recital. He was with another guest—a tubby little man with a black beard. They were discussing it.”

“And what was your interest in the box?”

“It wasn't so much the box; it was the music I wanted.”

“The music?”

“Paganini's music.”

“The Serenata
Appassionata
?” I asked.

“Yes.”

Marco pulled out a drawer of his desk and removed a brown manila envelope. From the envelope he produced a thin sheaf of yellowed manuscript paper. I saw the handwritten title at the top of the first page—“Serenata
Appassionata
”—and the dedication, “To Princess Elisa Baciocchi.” It was Paganini's handwriting. Below that was the tempo marking, “
Adagio ma non troppo
,” and then the music itself—the treble and bass clefs of a piano part in D major, common time, the notes scrawled untidily across the staves.

“This is the piano accompaniment?” I said. “And the violin part?”

“That's what I've been looking for,” Marco replied. “It's obsessed me for years.”

“Where did you get this?”

“It belongs to my family, passed down through the generations.”

“From Elisa to Felice Baciocchi, and then by marriage to the Martinellis.”

“That's right. But the violin part has always been missing. My grandfather used to talk about it to me when I was a child—Paganini's long-lost masterpiece. No one else in my family was interested. They thought he was just a senile old man making up stories. He talked
about the Moses box, too—that's what he called it, ‘the Moses box'—a gold box with Moses and the Ten Commandments on the lid. He said it had belonged to Paganini, too, but it had disappeared years ago. That's why I pricked up my ears when I heard Villeneuve talking about it. If he had the Moses box, perhaps he might have information that would lead me to the violin part of the Serenata
Appassionata
.”

“You didn't know about the jewelled violin?” Guastafeste asked.

“What jewelled violin? I wanted only the music. I thought if I could find it, it would boost my career. A new, undiscovered work by Paganini, which would get me a tenured post. And it would put one over on Castellani. The great Vittorio Castellani, that smug, patronising bastard, treating me like a typist, a servant. I'd show him.”

“And did Villeneuve know anything about the music?” I asked.

“I didn't find out.”

“What happened in his hotel room?” Guastafeste said.

Marco hesitated.

“I didn't intend to kill him; you have to believe that. You have to. I went to talk to him. He wouldn't tell me anything. He tried to throw me out. I refused to go. He started shouting at me. I lost my temper. I know I shouldn't have. I picked up the table lamp. . . . I didn't think I hit him that hard, but he went down. He was on the floor. I thought I'd just knocked him out. I panicked, opened the door, and ran. It was only later that I found out he was dead.”

Marco glared defiantly at Guastafeste, then at me.

“He was stupid, stubborn. He should have told me. All I wanted to know about was the music. That music is mine. I've spent years looking for it. It's
mine
, you understand?”

Marco slumped forward over the desk and covered his face with his hands, his whole body shaking. Guastafeste pulled him to his feet and handcuffed him. Marco offered no resistance. There was no fight left in him.

We went downstairs to the foyer and Guastafeste called the
questura
and asked them to send a police van to pick up Marco. Once they'd arrived, we drove back to Cremona in Guastafeste's unmarked
car. He was subdued, uncharacteristically quiet. He'd got his man, got his confession, but there was little satisfaction to be had from it. Things are rarely that simple.

I, too, was quiet. There was one other loose end to tie up, one more mystery to solve. I was working out how I was going to do it.

R
uggiero Monteveglio was waiting for me outside the Villa Nettuno. We shook hands and I apologised for disturbing him again. I hoped this wasn't going to take up too much of his time.

We went inside the house and through to the music room. The shutters were closed, so Monteveglio switched on the lights. I studied the artwork on the walls, stopping in front of the collage of photocopied music that had caught my attention on my previous visit. It was an interesting example of Nicoletta Ferrara's work. She had photocopied various pieces of classical music, then cut the photocopies up into small sections, most just a few bars long, and arranged them in patterns across a sheet of thick board. I recognised several of the pieces immediately: There were the opening four bars of Beethoven's
Kreutzer
Sonata, part of Tartini's
Dev il's Trill
Sonata, snippets of the Brahms violin concerto, and several sections from Bach's unaccompanied sonatas and partitas. It was like a musical jigsaw, or something devised as a party game—identify the composers and the works.

All the extracts seemed to be violin music, and they were all photocopies of printed music—with one exception. In the lower corner of the board was a segment of handwritten music, the opening few bars of a piece I didn't know. It was a single stave in the treble clef, a key signature of D major, common time, with the tempo marking “
Adagio ma non troppo
.”

“Where did your aunt do her art?” I asked.

“She had a studio,” Monteveglio replied.

“In the house?”

“In the boat house down by the lake.”

“There's a boathouse?”

“On the other side of the main road. You go through a tunnel to get to it.”

“May I see it?”

“If you wish.”

We went out onto the terrace and down the steps through the garden. It was an overcast day, cooler than the previous time I'd been there. A stiff breeze was blowing in from the lake, ruffling my hair and plucking at the sleeves of my jacket.

The paths were all overgrown by vegetation, the damp air filled with the scents of pine and sage and wild garlic. In a niche in the wall, a spring bubbled out from a crack in the rock, filling a stone basin before over-flowing and running away down a rill that was half-smothered in ivy and weeds. I caught a glimpse of a classical statue in a shady hollow next to a huge cypress tree, the figure of a man with a trident in his hand.

“Neptune?” I said.

“There are statues all over the place,” Monteveglio replied. “Most of them you can't see for the undergrowth. Aunt Nicoletta had only the one gardener. She could have afforded a whole team, but she seemed to prefer the place wild and untamed. I think it appealed to her wilful nature.”

Perhaps I, too, had a wilful nature, for I found something intensely alluring about this wilderness. It had an atmosphere, a mystery that
well-kept gardens lack. Every corner, every turn in the path brought the promise of a surprise, of a hidden treat.

We rounded a large clump of azaleas and I saw a dark opening in the ground ahead of us—the tunnel beneath the road. We plunged inside it. It was cool and moist. The smell of damp earth increased, oozing out from the moss-coated walls.

“This is the only house in the area with its own tunnel,” Monteveglio said. “Everyone else has to walk across the road to get to the lake.”

We stepped out onto a small beach. The shingle crunched beneath our shoes. The water was clear and choppy, the waves lapping the shore. To our right was an old wooden boat house with a red-tiled roof. The lower section of the building was partly below water level and had two big doors on the lakeside to allow a boat to enter and leave. The upper section had windows on all four sides, plus skylights in the roof.

We climbed a flight of worn wooden stairs and Monteveglio unlocked the door. I could see at once why Nicoletta Ferrara had used the room inside as a studio. It was filled with light, and from the windows was a view of Lake Maggiore and the Alps that would have inspired anyone to want to paint.

The studio had apparently remained untouched since Nicoletta's death. An easel was set up in the centre, an uncompleted canvas on it, and there were more canvases—finished and unfinished—leaning up against the walls. A workbench down one side was covered with oil paints and acrylics and pots of glue, and next to the bench was a small photocopier.

“Do you mind if I poke round a bit?” I asked.

Monteveglio shrugged indifferently.

“Feel free.”

There were several chests of drawers of varying sizes underneath the workbench. One had wide, shallow drawers and contained large sheets of card and paper. Another was full of half-used tubes of paint and dirty brushes. In the third chest, I found what I was looking for—the music Nicoletta had used for the collages in the villa. There were
books of violin sonatas by Beethoven, Mozart, Bach, and others; concertos by Brahms, Tchaikovsky, Bruch; a miscellany of smaller pieces by composers such as Sarasate, Vieuxtemps, and Wieniawski. I pulled each drawer out in turn until I saw the name Paganini. There was a thick stack of his compositions—the twenty-four caprices, the
Moto Perpetuo
, the “Moses Fantasy,” the concertos . . . and there at the bottom a few loose sheets of handwritten music.

I waited for a moment, feeling my heart beating faster; then I lifted the sheets out of the drawer and placed them carefully on the surface of the workbench. My fingers were trembling. I gazed down at the notes for a long time, singing the music in my head, hearing it as a violin might play it—hearing it as Paganini might have played it.

It all made sense now. There would not have been just the one copy of the Serenata
Appasionata
. Paganini gave the original music to Elisa Baciocchi, its dedicatee, but he would also have kept a copy for himself. On her death, Elisa's music passed to her husband, Felice, and from there to the Martinelli family, though somewhere along the line the violin part had gone missing, leaving only the piano accompaniment behind. Paganini's copy remained in his possession, but somehow it must have ended up with Antonia Bianchi after their separation. And from Antonia, it had been handed down through the generations to Nicoletta Ferrara.

I touched the pieces of paper with my fingertips and felt the same unsettling tingle I'd felt that afternoon when
il Cannone
had been brought to my workshop. I have always believed in spirits. I don't mean pale apparitions in clanking chains. I mean elements of the past lingering on into the present. I have a powerful sense that places still contain something of the people who once lived in them, that objects retain the imprint of their original owners. These things can't be seen or heard or smelt. Those senses are too sophisticated and developed. At our most basic level, we are not creatures who see or hear or smell. We are creatures who feel. I could feel a part of Paganini in these dog-eared sheets of paper, just as I'd felt it in his violin.

“Are you all right?” Monteveglio asked me in a concerned voice.

I turned my head.

“Yes, I'm all right.”

“Only you look as if you've seen a ghost.”

“Do I? A ghost?” I said. “Yes, I suppose I have.”

 

Guastafeste was the first guest to arrive. Well, the first after Margherita, who had driven out early from Milan to help me prepare lunch. Everything was under control. The chicken was in the oven, the vegetables peeled and chopped, the pasta sauce simmering gently on the hob, so with nothing else needing doing in the kitchen, the three of us went through into the sitting room with a glass of wine each.

It was almost six weeks now since Olivier Delacourt and Marco Martinelli had been arrested. I had not forgotten the traumatic events at Castenaso—I don't suppose I ever will—but they had receded in my memory and no longer gave me nightmares. The homicide cases had not been closed. Guastafeste and his colleagues were still preparing the evidence for the court hearings and trials that were to come, but the pressure was off him. He was looking fresh and rested, the shadows gone from round his eyes.

“Is that a new jacket you're wearing?” I asked him.

“Yes, I thought I'd treat myself. What do you think?”

“Very nice.”

“The colour suits you,” Margherita said.

“Thank you. I don't indulge myself very often, but . . . well, it's been a busy few weeks. I think I've earned a little reward.”

“How's it all going?” I asked.

“The magistrate is going easy on Marco. I think the charges are going to be reduced to manslaughter. There are extenuating circumstances. It seems clear that he didn't intend to kill Villeneuve. Villeneuve had an unusually thin skull. Marco's young; he's never been in trouble before. I think he'll get off with a pretty light sentence.”

“And Delacourt?”

“He's a different matter. Two brutal murders, one committed in
France, one in Italy. The legal red tape is going to be a nightmare, but I'd say he's going down for a long stretch. That reminds me. I've something to show you.”