A Murder in Tuscany Read online

  She’d heard the lift doors open; Tiziano. And slowly she’d shaken her head. ‘I’m not sure. Signore Gallo has called us to a meeting, eleven o’clock. The Dottoressa – the Director – she is – she isn’t here.’

  ‘Not here,’ Fairhead had said wonderingly. As though it might be something miraculous: and it did seem to Cate that Loni Meadows was everywhere in this castle, as a rule, even when she was away from it.

  The wheelchair had glided through the doors, and Cate had felt her heart lift. Tiziano – from Venice, like his namesake, although not a painter but a pianist – was the only one who ever used the lift, which was commonly considered, not only by Ginevra, to be an antiquated deathtrap. By contrast Tiziano’s wheelchair was state of the art, like nothing she’d ever seen before he arrived in the castle some six weeks earlier. It was streamlined and bright, with tilted wheels, gleaming chrome and black rubber, and he could move like lightning in it when he wanted to.

  Cate had fallen in love with Tiziano the moment he first beamed that wide, white smile up at her from his broad, stubbled face. Not much hair, a good fifteen years older than Cate, but there was something about him. Broad-shouldered, he was always in T-shirts, never a sweater; he kept himself warm, he said, manoeuvring the wheelchair. Tiziano was always in motion, and for twenty years he had been paralysed from the waist down. An accident, in which his father had died. So fiercely private, so capable, she didn’t want him to think she even considered his disability: she hadn’t asked him about the accident. They had offered him a live-in helper at the castle, but he had refused.

  Tiziano played the piano like a tumultuous force of nature; most evenings, Cate would come and stand at the foot of the stairs and listen when she heard him begin, until Ginevra called her back.

  ‘Buongiorno, bellissima,’ Tiziano had said, winking up at her. Cate couldn’t stop herself smiling.

  He’d known very well he should be speaking in English, but Tiziano was as adept at disobeying rules as he was at circumventing obstacles to his wheelchair. He’d seemed exactly as cheerful as always; Cate’d supposed he had heard nothing of the police visit.

  The two Americans – the women – weren’t here yet. They both lived in the outbuildings of the castle, and were often late, and they were as unlike as chalk and cheese, though it didn’t stop them sticking together. Tina – who made strange, graphic pots, stuck with leaves and detritus, a kind of Caribbean folk art – was from Orlando, in Florida. She was shy and slight, although some of her pots were as big as Greek oil jars and needed some manhandling.

  As she knew Miami a little from the cruises, Cate had tried to talk to Tina once or twice about Florida, but it was hard going; Cate had come to the conclusion she was simply homesick. She was supposed to produce a little show, next week; there had been some talk about it from the others, but not from Tina. She was jumpy about it. She’d started slipping into the little room next to the dining room to watch the castle’s only television and catch the news every night; news of the world outside.

  Then there was Michelle from Queens, New York, who lived out of choice in the modern studio behind the laundry building, with her long, unkempt grey-blonde hair and air of perpetual whirlwind fury. Cate, walking past the wide windows of Michelle’s apartment one day with an armful of tablecloths from the laundry, had seen her hunched bodily over the long white table and writing furiously, like a child hiding her work from the class cheat. She’d seemed to sense Cate there, and had turned on her a blinding glare.

  Michelle was a poet and a librettist, which, Cate knew, was someone who wrote the words for operas. She’d read her poetry early on in her residency, stonily, challenging her audience to comment. Cate wondered about the presentations; most of the guests seemed to dread them, when it came to their turn. Michelle was childless.

  Tina didn’t drink coffee and half the time she didn’t turn up at all; when she did, she sipped a brew of her own, made of boiled-up Chinese herbs. She inhabited the small villino, divided now into an apartment on the first floor and a workshop below, where Mauro had grown up, although his family had never owned it. A tied house: Mauro’s father before him had been the castle’s gardener and factotum, but the tied house had lapsed on his death and the creation of the Trust. The office in Baltimore, established proudly by old Orfeo, setting his faith in American reason and logic and justice, got blamed for an awful lot around here. The villino was only five minutes away, at the end of a stunted avenue of cypresses planted by Mauro’s father and sadly neglected.

  Michelle sometimes went to see Tina late at night; Cate had seen the two of them walk down between the cypresses, and some days Cate suspected she stayed over there. It had a spare bed.

  ‘I should go,’ Cate had said, now feeling nervous. She knew she could leave them together. Tiziano seemed to like the Englishman so perhaps they would want to talk. In fact the Venetian was good at getting on with everyone; Cate could not claim any special friendship with him.

  She’d been almost out and home free, when she’d heard it, on the stairs, a commotion. A bellowing, like a charging beast.

  ‘It’s her, isn’t it? Where is she?’ Coming from up above her so it could only be Per Hansen, but his voice had been hardly recognizable. ‘What’s happened to her?’ Could he be drunk? He did drink, glass after glass some evenings and never a sign of being actually drunk. But at this time in the morning? He’d leaned over the banisters, his sandy hair sticking up, his bushy fair eyebrows even wilder than usual, and Cate had seen that he was alone. He must be talking – shouting – to himself.

  She’d fled.

  Five minutes later, the staff – Mauro, Anna-Maria the cleaner, Nicki, Cate and Ginevra – had all gathered in the dining room.

  Luca Gallo stood at the head of the dining-room table, a piece of paper in his hands that he kept folding and unfolding.

  ‘I’m very sorry to tell you,’ he said, and for a moment he stopped as though unsure of how to proceed. He looked as though he really was sorry; his twinkling eyes were dull and distracted, and his cheerful, bearded face was for once sober with shock. He started again, and this time he spoke for ten minutes, and no one said a word; they all just stared.

  Dead.

  ‘Last night – between here and Pozzo Basso. On her way to Pozzo. Some time around midnight.’

  The dining room suddenly seemed to grow cold. Everyone stood very still, not sure of what to do next.

  An accident. She always drove too fast; for a seasick moment on hearing the words Cate had seen the dark road as though through a windscreen, coming up to meet her.

  As always, Luca took the initiative. ‘We must continue our work as usual,’ he said, in answer to the unspoken question. ‘We must carry on: this is an unfortunate accident, a terrible accident – but we can still function.’ He leaned forwards, both hands flat on the table, his ardour revived. ‘The guests have another month here, and they have their work to do. We have ours.’

  There was a ground murmur, a shifting around the table, the muttered sounds of relief and shock mingled as people took permission to return to real life. Mauro got to his feet first, exchanging words with Ginevra, who looked visibly shaken. Nicki seemed half excited, half frightened, watching for Ginevra to get back into gear, and as for me, thought Cate, I’m on the outside. Answerable to everyone and no one, with the little motorino for a quick getaway. She sat, numb.

  Per Hansen had been right: something had happened to her.

  Could it be true? Dead? How could she be dead? They’d all seen her only hours earlier, only last night, fizzing with life and energy and flirtation and malice, those blue eyes bright and dangerous. Loni Meadows, Dottoressa, Director of the Orfeo Trust; suddenly it seemed to Cate absolutely impossible that such a person could die.

  Yesterday morning, alive and well, in one of her haughty tempers at coffee because not enough of them wanted to go to the Pinacoteca in Siena next week. Walking down to the villino later, to see Tina’s work in progress. At drink
s, talking to Alec Fairhead about someone she knew at his publisher’s. ‘Gorgeous girl,’ she’d said, giving him a sly look, ‘just your type.’ At dinner, telling Per she planned to go to Oslo for his premiere. Talking about art galleries in New York, putting people’s backs up, her life full to the brim and now gone.

  Cate had seen her at eleven, and something like an hour later, she’d been dead. Cate shook her head in disbelief.

  As everyone dispersed, she saw Luca Gallo’s eyes on her, and when she returned his look with a questioning glance he held up a finger to detain her.

  ‘I’d like to see you in my office, Caterina,’ he said. ‘Half an hour?’

  ‘You’ve what?’ Giuli wasn’t good at disguising her feelings; she sounded like a kid at the back of the class, crowing over a teacher’s slip.

  ‘I’ve lost her,’ said Sandro.

  Sandro’s part-time receptionist, secretary and assistant, Giuli – Giulietta Sarto – did not have much of a CV. The daughter of a drugaddicted prostitute who worked the Via Senese and overdosed before her child was fifteen, Giuli was a graduate of prison and psychiatric hospital who had come into Sandro’s life when he had arrested her, four years earlier, for the murder of her one-time abuser. It had been his last case as a serving police officer, the same case that had led to his early retirement, and in its wake he and Luisa had as good as adopted Giuli.

  Her rehabilitation had worked better than expected – thanks to them, some had said, though Sandro always argued it was down to the girl’s sheer stubborn determination – and Giuli was on his side, for better or worse. Skinny, razor-tongued and sharp as a tack, she was as close to a daughter as Sandro and Luisa were ever going to get, and Sandro for one could not have got through the previous year without her.

  Half the week Giuli worked at the Women’s Centre, around the corner from the Via del Leone in the sleepy little Piazza Tasso; since close on a year earlier, more or less when Luisa started the treatment, Giuli had taken to calling in on Sandro, for a chat, or to bring him a coffee. She brought him stories from the Centre too; who’d got clean, who’d got pregnant, gossip about bent police officers and pimps and respectable women.

  Then one morning she’d caught him swearing at his computer and had nudged him aside. Sitting next to him at the desk she had taught him how to organize his email address book, how to re-boot, to clean up his data and update his word-processing package, how to use internet search engines properly. And when a week or so later she’d got down on her hands and knees to pull all the drawers out of his filing cabinet to retrieve a wedge of papers that had got caught at the back, Sandro had suggested, tentatively, that she might think about formalizing the relationship, two mornings a week to start with.

  Financially, of course, it made no sense at all; Sandro was hardly earning himself. But he’d always liked to find the odd twenty euros for Giuli, and this way, she was happier to take the money. And God knew, there was always something for her to do; she’d even followed the baker’s wife for him, one morning when Sandro was worried the woman had started to recognize him. By the end of the year Giulietta had saved enough to pick herself up a battered brown motorino. It looked pre-war.

  ‘Wouldn’t you want something a bit brighter?’ he’d asked, eyeing the ancient machine doubtfully, and Giuli had tapped the side of her nose. ‘If I had something in metallic pink with Barbie decals,’ she’d said, ‘it wouldn’t be so handy, would it? For surveillance.’

  Sandro hadn’t known if she was joking or not, and the sharp, conspiratorial nudge she’d given him with her bony shoulder had not enlightened him. He’d said nothing, mulling the idea over. He didn’t want to disappoint her. But why not? Giuli was clever, and she was good at making herself invisible, a thin, watchful forty year old in market-stall clothes. She was even taking English classes, two evenings a week; she thought he didn’t know that was where his money went, but Luisa had let it slip.

  He’d think about it; or at least, if they ever got another proper client, he would.

  In the meantime they had an arrangement: if he was on a job and she needed to talk to him, she’d text. If she rang him, she might interrupt something; she might draw attention to him precisely when he wanted to stay invisible. The faceless bystander no one ever noticed or remembered.

  Sandro mumbled. ‘What did you call about?’ He was sitting in the car, in the cold, outside the Liceo Marzocco.

  His mobile had bleeped at him as he stood on the cold pavement grinding his teeth with impotent fury. Call in? The message had been sent when he’d been at that signal-free zone at the foot of the Monte Alle Croci; in the nice stuffy bar, filling up on brioche and caffè latte, reading the paper and congratulating himself on how well the day was going.

  He had been able to see the gap where the pink Vespa had been as he walked up the hill. He’d planted himself on the pavement, no longer caring if he was seen, and waited for them to come out, watching for Carlotta, waiting for the long-haired boy. No show.

  He’d climbed into the car to look at his phone, and dialled Giuli.

  The crowd of kids had more or less dispersed now; just one or two stragglers around a lamp-post. He watched them, the phone to his ear, mouth turned down. ‘So?’

  Giuli wasn’t going to let him off that easily. ‘You’re getting old, Sandro,’ she crowed, ‘I tell you, I know all the tricks in the book, where high-school students are concerned. I should be following the girl.’

  And then what would I be? The redundant detective, out to grass.

  ‘Well, if you behaved yourself,’ he said mildly, ‘maybe I’d let you do some tailing. But for now, just tell me what you called about.’

  ‘Right,’ said Giuli, remembering herself. ‘OK. A call from a guy called something – um – ’ she fumbled, the sound of papers rustling took over and Sandro had to restrain a sigh. Bright, but disorganized; give her a chance.

  ‘Here it is.’ She resurfaced. ‘Luca Gallo.’

  Sandro leaned back into the driving seat. ‘Uh huh,’ he said vaguely. For a moment the name meant nothing to him, then it did. ‘Right,’ he said. ‘The guy from the whatsit Trust.’

  Across the road the kids at the lamp-post had turned to look at him; he shifted his position a bit to obscure his face from them, shoulder against the window.

  ‘Um – Trust, yeah. Wants you to call him.’

  ‘Orfeo,’ repeated Sandro automatically, his brain re-engaging. ‘The background check.’ He sighed at the thought of all those other employee checks awaiting him, and the bodyguard work. Nightclub bouncer, that’s where he’d end up. Employed as a charity case by one of Luisa’s admirers.

  ‘He sounded – funny,’ said Giuli hesitantly.

  ‘Funny?’

  At that moment someone came out through the school’s gate, and a cheer went up from the boys at the lamp-post. Sandro turned to look and saw that it was the lanky boy into whose eyes Carlotta had been gazing. Alberto the rich kid.

  ‘Call you back,’ said Sandro, stuffing the phone in his pocket.

  The three overgrown boys clustered around the parked motorini, jostling each other, pulling on helmets. Without a moped of his own Alberto ousted one of his pals, taking control and forcing the kid to ride pillion.

  Fortunately for Sandro the street was one-way, because it would have been impossible to manage a U-turn in the confined space; certainly not without drawing attention to himself. His tailing skills needed a little attention, that was for sure; a battered, nondescript motorino such as Giuli’s mightn’t be a bad idea, either. He sat with the engine running until they went past, a cigarette clamped between Alberto’s lips as he talked around it, helmetless and entertaining his entourage, taking a hand off the handlebars to gesture in the air, the motorino swerving as he did so.

  Not for the first time, Sandro felt a spasm of pity for little Carlotta Bellagamba.

  At the bottom of the hill they swung through the Porta San Miniato, left past the little bar where Sandro had lost the plot,
down the high-sided canyon of the Via San Niccolò, then a sharp right around the great bulk of the Palazzo dei Mozzi with its huge, studded door. They were on the Piazza Demidoff, overlooking the river, where the rich kids hang out.

  The gang pulled up in front of what looked like a closed-up restaurant or club with shuttered windows, on the corner of the street; they seemed to be fishing through their pockets, looking for something. Sandro double-parked outside a bar thronging with outdoor smokers, and watched. The shuttered windows weren’t completely dead; a string of red fairylights twinkled along the top of the shutters, and there was a dim light visible through a glazed section at the top of the door.

  Whatever it was the boys had been looking for – and Sandro guessed it was money – they found it. They were lined up at the door now, Alberto, the tallest by a head, in the lead, pressing a bell and talking into an intercom, and then they were inside, the boy at the back shoving a little to hurry them in.

  Right, thought Sandro, with gloomy satisfaction. He knew what kind of place it was; he knew they weren’t in there spending their parents’ money on dried-up sandwiches. He knew, too, that if he went in after them, a man in late middle age on his own, he might as well attach a flashing beacon to his head and imitate a police siren.

  He got himself a slice of pizza, returned to the car, and watched.

  The afternoon faded. Half a dozen times Sandro stuck the key in the ignition, ready to jack it in. He was being paid to watch Carlotta Bellagamba, not her boyfriend, and he was being alternately chilled to the bone or suffocated by the car’s faulty, fume-laden heater. He thought of Giuli, wondered idly what Gallo wanted. It had been money for old rope, that job; he supposed he wouldn’t mind another like it, running a few things through the system, checking credit and criminal records, following up references. He hadn’t even needed to leave his office.