A Murder in Tuscany (35 page)

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Authors: Christobel Kent

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BOOK: A Murder in Tuscany
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Michelle was faster than him: he observed her strong back, the knotted muscle in her calves as she overtook him easily. Behind them Luca had eased up and was leaning down to talk to Tiziano in the chair, but Sandro couldn’t look back any more. He saw her below him at the
window of the
villino
, banging, heard her shout, saw her desperate face as she turned it to him. Michelle. He felt old and useless, but he had to keep going.
The weak, not the strong: of course. Luisa had remembered that, and Tina Kreutz had been weak, until suddenly she wasn’t.
Michelle was on her knees at the door of the
villino
, doing something with the mat. ‘She keeps a key under here,’ she was saying, and as Sandro drew up at the door, his heart banging, out of the corner of his eye he saw rubbish scattered across the snow, as though a fox had got at the bins.
‘Where is he?’ he said, breathless, of poor, deluded Alec Fairhead: haven’t we all been there, too dumb to know what’s going on in a woman’s head? Thinking it’s all about us.
‘Oh, Jesus,’ he heard from inside the
villino
, ‘Oh, Jesus.’ And as he came in through the door, he saw that in the middle of the room there was a long workstation like the altar in a church and on the floor protruding from behind it a shoe, a foot in the shoe, a leg, and bending over it Michelle.
‘Come on,’ she was saying, panting, ‘come on.’ He saw the pieces of pottery across the floor, where something big had smashed. Something heavy. And coming around it again saw the whole length of Alec Fairhead’s body. Michelle raised her face to him, and beneath her Sandro saw Fairhead’s head roll to one side on the stone floor under its own weight.
No.
Then roll back, eyelids fluttering.
‘He’s alive,’ said Michelle. ‘He’s breathing.’ And Sandro thrust his mobile at her.
‘And her?’ Sandro said desperately. ‘And her?’ Michelle looked at him, not understanding, but he found he couldn’t explain: explaining would take too long. ‘Ambulance,’ was all he managed. ‘Call 118, ambulance.’
And he ran out; above him, up at the top of the long, long path, the black shape of the castle behind them, he saw Luca and Tiziano, and even at this distance he knew from Scarpa’s face that he wouldn’t find Caterina up there, safe in the kitchen.
Sandro had heard the sound before he’d seen the two men. He followed it down, and then he saw footprints in the snow, scuffed and hasty, so he couldn’t tell how many sets there were. He kept looking down, following the footprints instead of the sound, wishing he couldn’t hear it, wishing he never would have to look up. But then he did.
There was no wind to move her, but she twisted, all in white, a long white gown, a nightdress. The branch bowed under her small weight but the belt she’d slipped over her neck had held, and her bare feet pointed downwards. Tiny feet, the size of a child’s, barely into adolescence, small, perfect toes, perfectly white, perfectly lifeless.
The sound came from Caterina, crumpled on the ground below Tina Kreutz’s small bare feet; a raw, half-swallowed sound of despair. She raised her face to his, her eyes huge and dark.
‘I tried to hold her up,’ she said with horror. ‘I couldn’t do it.’
‘I know,’ said Sandro.
The hand he took was black with something, her face was dirty and streaked as though she had been playing a game of Cowboys and Indians, her clothing when he pulled her up and put his arms around her to stop her shivering was so wet he felt it soak into his own. But he felt her strong heart beat through the layers of clothing, he felt the answering warmth of her shoulders under his, all telling him, this one’s alive, all right.
I
T WAS CLOSE TO midnight when Sandro Cellini left. And as she watched the tail-lights of the little car dip behind the far hill from the position she had taken up at the head of the great cypress avenue, the grand, forbidding front elevation of the Castello Orfeo at her back, Caterina Giottone contemplated the strange truth that she would probably never see him again.
But as she turned away from the lonely vista, something miraculous happened. All across the Castello Orfeo, all at once, the electricity came back on, and this grim, isolated prison of a place was transformed. For a wonderful second, it resembled a funfair or even a great ocean liner sailing across the dark, snow-covered hills, its decks and ballrooms blazing with light.
‘Finally,’ a voice said brusquely at her elbow, appearing out of the dark and smelling of woodsmoke, sweat and cooking. ‘Perhaps we can get back to work now. Or are you leaving us too?’
Ginevra.
Not everyone was gone. Per and his wife had packed up and left first in the jaunty little red car, Per enveloping Cate in a brief, tobaccoscented bear-hug. Telling her to visit Oslo, as his wife fussed and protested around them, ferrying bags.
Cate didn’t know what Sandro Cellini and Luca Gallo between them had said to the policeman who eventually arrived out from Pozzo Basso at close to seven in the evening, but it seemed he was convinced by it. The coroner’s office had removed Tina’s body to the morgue, where a post-mortem would be carried out. Posturing and pompous, the policeman had said that he would need to talk to Alec Fairhead, when he was considered fit enough by the doctors in Pozzo, where the helicopter had taken him.
Conscious now, although almost certainly with his skull fractured, Fairhead had looked ten, fifteen years younger as they carried him gingerly on a stretcher up to the helicopter whose blades whirred on the front lawn. Washed clean; born again. He’d looked up at Cate, who had been holding his hand, and somehow managed to say, with an odd delight, ‘It’s like they say when you have a stroke, and you wake up speaking a foreign language. It’s like that.’ She had nodded, not knowing what on earth he meant, but believing him all the same.
He’d tried to say more: to say that before he put his arm around her and tried to kiss her to calm her down, Tina had been talking about all sorts of things he didn’t understand. Voodoo and burning and fetching water from the river: almost biblical, Fairhead had said, growing agitated and bewildered at the memory. Cate had hushed him. ‘Someone will talk to you about that later,’ she’d said. ‘Don’t think about it now.’ And she’d just smiled as calmly as she could and he had subsided back down on to the stretcher and allowed Cate to extract her hand from his.
‘Nicki’s going, you know,’ said Ginevra accusingly. ‘Going to live in Rome, she says; there’s a girl there she was at school with.’ And sighed. ‘Now she tells me, with Mauro in hospital and all hell breaking loose.’
‘Yeah, well,’ said Cate, hearing a grudging resignation in Ginevra’s voice. ‘It was time, you know.’
The lights were back on in the bungalow: Michelle wasn’t leaving yet after all. She wanted to talk to the police herself, she said. She wanted to make sure they knew everything.
I’ve done this before
, Cate heard her say to Luca earlier.
This suicide shit
,
it’s not straightforward
. She had
sounded tired, like a mother at the end of a hard day, hands in the sink and the floor still to wash.
It’s OK
, she said to Luca.
I’m fine.
And she’d gone to Tiziano’s room, and they’d shut the door.
‘Actually,’ Cate said now to Ginevra, ‘I’m not going. Sorry about that.’
‘I don’t know what I can offer you, Cate,’ Luca had said as they watched Sandro Cellini pacing the front lawns once the helicopter had risen and gone. The detective had been on his mobile, an hour or more, the tracks of his boots criss-crossing the snow as he paced and talked. His wife, Nicki had said.
Luca had shrugged, tired but not unhappy, the burden of trying to love this terrible, draughty old place lifted from him. ‘I don’t know what Orfeo plans to do now.’
‘I’ll stick around until it’s sorted,’ Cate had said to him. ‘No problem.’
Ginevra made a sound that only the privileged few would interpret as approval, and stamped away in the snow under the light cast from the library windows.
Tiziano had not told anyone his plans.
All Michelle had said, when she came out of his darkened room at last, was, ‘He wants to see you.’ And then she’d grabbed Cate’s elbow, so hard it hurt, and pulled her down to listen. ‘But you be sure you know what you’re doing first,’ she said levelly in the dark, ‘because if you hurt him you’ll have me to answer to.’
And inside the castle, Tiziano began to play.
 
 
Commissario Grasso had not been even faintly apologetic, but then Sandro had not expected that he would be. ‘She was overcome with remorse?’ the policeman had said, his lip curling. ‘Ah, yes.’ Refusing to believe a word of it. ‘Well, let’s wait and see, shall we? Post-mortem tomorrow or the day after. We’ll expect your attendance at the coroner’s court, in due course.’
At which Sandro had simply nodded, giving up the fight. Why should he care what such a man thought of him?
Then he’d called Mascarello. Who had also refused to believe it.
It was Fairhead
,
wasn’t it?
he had kept saying.
I knew it was him
.
So. He’d had a very good idea all about the dirty little affair, and the abortion, but he hadn’t told Sandro. Wanted to keep his hands clean, and get Sandro to nail Fairhead for him. Playing with him; feeding him information, titbits.
‘I’m sorry,’ Sandro had said. ‘He’s admitted to the email. He didn’t kill her, though. Even apart from the alibi, and the fact that there’s evidence, there’s cast-iron evidence – well. Never mind that. He’s just not capable of it. Sometimes – ’ and he’d lowered his voice respectfully, ‘sometimes you just know, don’t you?’
And at the other end of the line only the wheeze of Mascarello’s fading breath had been audible. Only you don’t know, Sandro had thought with grim satisfaction. You can’t tell the innocent from the guilty, the right from the wrong. Not you.
Reluctantly, he had said goodbye to Caterina, to Luca Gallo: silently he’d wished them well, but for himself he wished never to return to such a desolate place. And as he drove home in the dark, wearily careful on the deserted seaside road, around Grosseto, north to Siena, bumping through the Chianti under the great snow-covered trees, Sandro heard music in his head.
It was an old tune, a song from the south to which in their youth he and Luisa had countless times watched elderly couples turn slowly in each other’s arms in one summer festival or another. And as they had looked at the expressions on the old faces rested on the other’s shoulder or pressed soft against the other’s cheek – absent, dreaming, resigned, content – each had secretly wondered what it would be like, in forty years’ time. Fifty.
Had they both thought that they would still be together? That they might however have traded the hungry, speechless thing they felt for each other as twenty-two year olds for something more easeful and certain and dull? That they might have come to know and understand each other more like brother and sister than lovers?
Sandro drew up under the dark, dripping eaves of the tall, shabby
palazzo
on whose second floor he and Luisa had slept side by side for
more than thirty years, and let himself in. Brother and sister? He felt a smile spread across his face for the first time in months. Easeful?
He slipped beneath the covers and felt the warmth she had made there, smelled her skin. Lovers. She turned over in her sleep, murmuring something indistinct, and her hand felt for his and held it.
Sandro lay awake until the clock that had always stood on his side of the bed told him that it was 5.30. He slipped his hand out of Luisa’s.
‘Wake up, sweetheart,’ he said. ‘Time to go.’
T
HEY CRESTED THE HILL to see the winter sun hovering on the far horizon, a wide vista of pale grey hills and leafless woodlands ahead and the dark ribbon of a river threading the valley floor below. The driver braked abruptly on the rise and a cloud of dust rose behind them, enveloping the big brute of a car. He turned towards his passenger and with a sweeping gesture bestowed upon him all that they surveyed.
‘Here,’ he said, in English so heavily accented that even that single syllable was barely recognizable. ‘Castello Orfeo. Welcome.’ And he smiled, a flat smile that didn’t reach his eyes, a glint of gold far back in his mouth.
Beside him the traveller looked down an avenue of dusty black cypresses that dipped and rose straight ahead of them, bisecting the landscape and ending in dark woods from which rose the grey stone flanks of a handsome fifteenth-century castle: steep, solid and unadorned. Not strictly speaking a fortress but a keep, even in the last rosy tint of a fading winter afternoon, the Castello Orfeo, uncompromising as it had always been, made no attempt to endear itself to its newest guest.
She was waiting for them, the massive fortified doorway in which she stood emphasizing the daintiness of her figure, her girl’s shoulders,
her tiny ankles. The huge, luminous blue eyes gazing at him; the cloud of red-gold hair. She held out her delicate painter’s hands towards him, and the flicker of a satisfied smile settled on her lips.
‘Mr Fairhead,’ she said for the benefit of a small, impromptu reception committee. A tall girl in an apron stood at the back; she had long, black, centre-parted hair, and her face was the perfect, pale, melancholy oval of a country Madonna. And with her were the other guests, whose company Alec Fairhead completed: two men besides him, and two women. All present and correct. ‘We are so very honoured.’
Anyone looking at Alec Fairhead in the rapidly growing dusk might have been forgiven for thinking that all he wanted to do was to turn and climb back into the car and tell the driver with his gold tooth to get him out of there. But as everyone waited on the new arrival’s response to the Director’s greeting, darkness had fallen behind him across the wide, dusty landscape and it was too late.

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