The Viper Read online

  ‘You knew her when she lived here, then,’ said Martinelli. Her voice was deep, like a man’s, and rough.

  ‘I met her in the city,’ said Luisa. ‘I never came out here. I worked in a shop in the city.’ All true.

  Martinelli nodded. ‘They did spend time in the city. Art, they were always on about art.’ Seeming mollified. Seeming to have had enough, dismissing her to turn back to her smallholding, the abandoned vehicles under the trees, the tilting stone house with dark windows.

  The man, Bartolini, spoke. Luisa had the feeling he’d waited until the woman was out of earshot. ‘I expect you’d like to see the place?’ he said. ‘La Vipera? I mean, that’s why you came, isn’t it? To –’ he smiled gently, not with any malice that she could see ‘– pay your respects?’ And he inclined his head respectfully. ‘I could take you.’

  ‘Well, I –’ She hesitated. She would have liked to talk to Maria Clara Martinelli, but the woman was already ambling across the road, starting up the uneven ground as Luisa watched. She turned back to see Bartolini examining her with a frown – and then his face cleared.

  He smiled. He had a nice smile; it reached his eyes. ‘I’m not expecting you to get on the back of the motorino, Signora Cellini,’ he said, his mouth turning down now in mock seriousness, pocketing the key, gesturing up the hill. ‘We can walk. It’s not far.’

  *

  No time like the present.

  Sandro was on the three o’clock train, the fast train – the sleek Frecciarossa to Bologna, where he would change for Modena – and experiencing the unfamiliar sensation of being on expenses. They’d put him in business class: leather seats, free coffee and newspapers, a tiny plastic packet of crackers. He eyed his fellow passengers, trying to settle down in the presence of businessmen – and women. One opposite him, with long glossy hair, was on her laptop, busily tapping, occasionally avoiding his eyes over the raised screen. Clearly, these days, in order to look like a businessperson you had to abjure all friendliness. He wished he was in steerage.

  Good preparation, Sandro told himself. He needed to be relaxed when he walked into Gorgone’s office.

  The uniformed steward had given Sandro what he was sure was a sceptical look as he declined the aperitivo with reluctance and took the tiny watery coffee instead, and the biscuits. And opened them straight away, stuffing his hand inside. Catching a glance, a head turning here and there at the noisy crackle of the packet, he’d looked around then and saw that, while some of his travelling companions had accepted a newspaper, they had all declined refreshments.

  He ate the crackers and wondered about following the steward down the aisle and asking for another, just on principle. Who was he trying to kid? Principles weren’t involved here. He was still hungry. Modena was the gourmet capital of Italy and therefore of the universe. How was he going to survive an hour there – he was booked on the six o’clock train home – on rocket salad and water?

  Pietro had offered him a squad car and a driver and Sandro, with sinking heart, had been about to accept when Pietro had followed it up with, ‘Of course, you can’t be uniformed, you understand that?’

  Of course, yes, Sandro understood that. But still, the thought of sitting in the back seat with some rookie driver as though he was a hundred years old, as though, more to the point, he, Sandro, was the criminal, that ageing fraudster of his nightmares, that got him stuttering. Mercifully, Pietro had understood straight away: twenty years as partners did that for you.

  ‘There’s always the train,’ he’d said, seamless as you like, as though he’d only just thought of it. ‘Much faster, these days.’ Diplomatically. ‘Half the time, in fact.’

  They had worked out a cover story, too, and Pietro had already cleared it with Gorgone. Sandro had been brought out of (recent! You don’t want him thinking I’m ninety!) retirement because of his earlier involvement with Nielsson and La Vipera.

  ‘You come,’ said Sandro, blunt. ‘Why don’t you?’ Pietro had smiled at that, mischievous, thank God, and not pitying, and said, ‘Sandro, you’re my secret weapon. Our secret weapon. I want to lull him into a false sense of security.’

  ‘You do suspect him, then.’

  Pietro had shrugged at that. ‘When I called to arrange the interview Gorgone informed me rather quickly that he was out of town on business for two weeks either side of her estimated date of death,’ he said. ‘And do you think Nielsson was killed by someone who didn’t know her? The woman was found in a place she hadn’t lived in for years: we can’t rule out the possibility – probability – that she was brought there, before or after death. Her killer took care over the presentation of the body, so perhaps returned to it at regular intervals.’ A pause. ‘Which may be how he – or she – happened to be there when Lotti turned up, unfortunately for him.’

  Coincidence then? Sandro didn’t believe it.

  As it turned out, he would barely have had time to eat a second packet of crackers because the journey – a headlong dark rush through tunnels – took only thirty-five minutes. His phone blipped as they emerged briefly to a flash of bright sunshine and a glimpse of soft green slopes: missed call, from the office. It must have come while they were underground. He tried to call back immediately but the darkness swallowed them again, the signal disappeared and he put the phone back in his pocket.

  At Bologna he switched to a regionale, moving more slowly. He hadn’t been up here in years and even then had only been on his way somewhere else. The flat plains stretched into misty distance – in winter it would all be blanketed by the sudden thick fogs for which the region was famous, rising off the great winding Po river. Blinded, traffic would slow on the huge motorways that met here, would turn muffled and mysterious, but now it could not seem more gentle and open a landscape.

  So Marcantonio Gorgone had come home, here, to possibly the quietest, safest, least dramatic city there was. Good for him.

  He wondered if Gorgone would remember him. He looked out through the train window across the flat pale landscape; a figure appeared, tiny in black silhouette, walking a dog along a dusty path between fields. The two figures in easy companionship, the dog waiting for the man then running on.

  Lotti’s dog had been a truffle hound. It had been killed, they assumed, because it would alert someone to Lotti’s death very quickly if allowed to run off in distress, but there could be other reasons. Malice? The dog was killed before Lotti – its body beneath his. Someone had expected him to appear after it? Certainly. Who could kill a dog ruthlessly? Most country people. And again the image of a figure waiting patiently in the dark came into his mind. Not coincidence, as Manzoni had proposed, but design.

  Houses began to appear, closing off the wide vista, the man with his dog disappeared and then they were rattling slowly into Modena station. Sandro consulted his phone for a route into the town and began to walk.

  ‘You can play it how you like, Alessandro,’ Pietro had said, his smile widening. ‘You can play it friendly, or grumpy, or bumbling, or nostalgic. God knows, you can play senile if you feel it’ll get you somewhere.’ And he winked.

  But now, Sandro had to remind himself, he’d been working alone for six years, and he could manage this little fishing expedition in his sleep.

  Standing at the centre of the big cobbled Piazza Duomo, he took a moment, overcome by how unfamiliar he was with his own country, how foreign it looked. He paused by the creamypink bulk of the cathedral, a thousand years old, two grinning lions guarding the entrance. Its pillared bell-tower leaned gently away from the duomo in the soft afternoon light, at its base a roll-call of partisans fallen in the Second World War.

  Sandro had been born not long after the end of that war, as Marcantonio Gorgone must have been, a child in a poor country, a landscape trampled and wrecked by three armies. Florence had been still half-ruined when he started school and yet it had grown over, been rebuilt with all the grumbling, painstaking slowness in which his countrymen were expert, the status quo restored, but nothing
was quite the same. We don’t want things to change, thought Sandro, and yet they do. Or is it that we think we are changing all the time, we think we have grown up, but we find ourselves creeping back to old habits, old places?

  Gorgone’s offices were in a soft red-brick arcaded façade in the sixteenth-century style where a row of highly polished bellpushes sat beside a vast wooden door. An accountancy firm, an architect, a psychotherapist. Upmarket was right.

  He got out his phone to turn it to silent and saw the little icon with its red alert and remembered the missed call. The mobile was very useful, of course, but Sandro wasn’t sure at his age if what he wanted was any more red alerts in his life.

  Just a missed call.

  There was no time to call Giuli back right now. His appointment with Gorgone was four o’clock and it was two minutes to. If it had been urgent she’d have tried again.

  He pressed the bell-push that said Studio Fitness Gorgone. The door buzzed back and he was admitted. A dim vaulted entrance hall smelling faintly of something like expensive church incense, a wide stone staircase. A young woman behind a desk, with shiny centre-parted dark hair and severe black-framed glasses that did not disguise her perfect good looks, smiled at him, rising to her feet. Behind her were blown-up photographs of what looked to Sandro like shining torture chambers but were in fact gym interiors. A lot of fitness equipment. Rows of cycling machines and treadmills and a blonde with very white teeth laughing in a Jacuzzi.

  And then there he was, after all these years, a glint of gold in his mouth, tucking his tie into a pair of very narrow, very well-cut trousers with an air of self-satisfaction, then holding out the hand to Sandro. His smooth, tanned face quite blank, no sign of recognition at all. None.

  Chapter Six

  BUSINESS WAS OBVIOUSLY GOOD for Marcantonio Gorgone, to judge by the old-school elegance of his offices, the cut of his suit and the deference of the assistant (that didn’t come cheap) as she brought them in coffees on a tiny silver tray.

  The dark-haired beauty let the door close behind her, and Sandro felt Gorgone’s eyes settle on him, thoughtfully.

  ‘Mr Gorgone,’ he said, hesitating under his look, and it came to Sandro in that pause that the man had been born into money, hadn’t he? You didn’t get access to this kind of prime office space without connections – and something came to him dimly from the past, that small German blonde standing in a doorway at La Vipera, forty years ago, looking sidelong at Gorgone and muttering something about pigs that Sandro had at first assumed to be a reference to him as a police officer. Pigs – of course. Emilia Romagna was the home of the prestige pig: culatello, salame, prosciutto, zampone. The Gorgone money came from pigs. The Po’s wide plains harboured hectares upon hectares of pig barns, their pungent fragrance drifting through the orchards and villas.

  Odd how much of La Vipera was still there in his head, just waiting to be stirred into life. It was what happened five minutes ago he forgot, a missed call. He remembered that blonde, the way she stood, hands in her pockets, watching. Michelle? Martine.

  He straightened in his chair – old leather, polished to a high shine – at the thought. ‘Mr Gorgone,’ he said again. His instinct was to begin by getting more details on the alibi, as Pietro had instructed him in no uncertain terms. ‘I’d like to –’

  ‘I do know you,’ said Gorgone, delighted as a child suddenly, interrupting him, leaning forward in his excitement so Sandro got a whiff of foul breath under peppermint. Getting to his feet. ‘You were the little cop who – you –’

  Sandro wondered exactly how many and what drugs Gorgone had taken back then. He had the air of a man with a good few synapses blown, and his delight at remembering Sandro had something of the simpleton about it. Little cop.

  ‘And now you’re into – wellness,’ said Sandro drily, balancing a smile on his face.

  The man sat back, pleased. ‘It’s excellent business,’ he said.

  And you don’t have to have many brain cells to pound a treadmill, thought Sandro, surrendering to peevishness. ‘I’m sure,’ he said. Gorgone went on looking pleased with himself for a good thirty seconds before he remembered why Sandro was there and hurriedly assumed the appearance of sorrowful sobriety.

  ‘Of course,’ he said earnestly, ‘since those days we have very much all gone our separate ways. I can tell you straight away I haven’t seen Johanna in ten, no, probably twenty years.’ The smile crafty. ‘Hadn’t.’

  ‘Is it ten or is it twenty?’ said Sandro, feeling weary already.

  Gorgone spread his hands in a rueful gesture. ‘I’m rather poor at dates,’ he said, then, grasping at some dim concept, ‘in this business it’s all about the future, you see.’ Sandro smiled a little – a very little – and said nothing. Gorgone went on hopefully. ‘It was before the millennium, I know that,’ he said.

  Sandro sighed. ‘So you have no idea of where she’d been living, any of that?’

  ‘Oh, I didn’t say that,’ said Gorgone, with a professional frown. Sandro resisted the urge to lean across his desk and yank on his silk tie.

  Gorgone inspected his manicured hands before going on. ‘She went back to Germany when we left La Vipera. I lived in Berlin with her for a couple of years and then …’ he affected a blasé air, ‘we grew apart.’

  She kicked him out, thought Sandro, she got bored, and he was aware of something, that fierce little stab he’d felt all those years ago. What had she been doing with a fool like Gorgone? She had been so much more than him, he’d seen that, back then, more in a bad way – but more.

  ‘After that, I bumped into her once in Los Angeles, I think late nineties, and,’ Gorgone shrugged, ‘that was it.’

  Los Angeles, thought Sandro, who’d never been to America. Los Angeles seemed to him a place for people like this. La Vipera had been called a community but it came to him now that it had never been a community. A group of twenty-somethings each with their own agenda wasn’t a community.

  ‘She didn’t marry?’ he asked. ‘Have a family, children, all that?’

  Gorgone shook his head. ‘I don’t believe so.’ He opened his mouth then closed it again.

  ‘How do you know,’ said Sandro, curious, ‘if you lost touch?’

  ‘A friend caught up with her – this summer, as a matter of fact.’ Gorgone waved a hand vaguely. ‘Up in Liguria somewhere. Near the Cinque Terre, travelling, you know. On the road.’ He caught Sandro’s interrogative glance and for once was ahead of him. ‘Who was the friend? Martine Kaufmann. She was – one of us. Living at La Vipera back then.’ He flushed.

  Martine. The watchful blonde standing in the doorway. And quite suddenly Sandro remembered her turning away as Johanna Nielsson had touched him lightly on the hand and asked him if he wanted to check the upper floors, in the second he hesitated before following her up the stairs.

  ‘Can we get hold of Miss Kaufmann?’ said Sandro, clearing his throat.

  ‘Oh yes,’ said Gorgone. ‘I’m sure. She’s lived in Florence for the last ten years or so – she paints, teaches, I don’t know. I bumped into her months ago, on the platform at Bologna – everyone ends up passing through Bologna, don’t you find? Our paths do cross now and again, although we – we’re very much on separate tracks these days. She’s – I believe she’s into good works, all that.’ A slight grimace of embarrassment.

  Sandro watched Gorgone, saying nothing. His colour still high as though emotions were beginning to kick in, as though the implications of all this were finally beginning to dawn on him, the businessman pulled open a drawer in his desk and began to rummage agitatedly. He brought out a brochure and handed it to Sandro. A cursory glance revealed some garish oils in a vaulted space and the indistinct figure of a fairhaired woman half-hidden behind a canvas. ‘Martine gave me this,’ he said. ‘It’s her business. I mean, if you want to contact her.’

  Sandro stashed it in his pocket. ‘Are you in touch with anyone else from that time?’

  Gorgone shook his head. ‘I thin
k quite possibly only Martine and I are still alive,’ he said, offhand. ‘A few went abroad. There was a girl I can’t quite – her name escapes me. I’ll, I’ll put some thought into it. Italian, I think she’s running a ski school in the Dolomites, or was. If I remember …’ Earnest, willing.

  ‘Thank you,’ said Sandro, and leaning forward he said, lowering his voice in an attempt to engage with whatever vulnerability was making Gorgone nervous, ‘my condolences. Really. I know back then we didn’t – it wasn’t the best footing for – you must realise now,’ looking around the handsome four-hundred-year-old space, ‘that perhaps rural Tuscany wasn’t quite ready for experiments in communal living.’

  Gorgone stared at him blankly. ‘Well, no,’ he said, impatient. ‘It’s how the world was then. We were young, there was a bit of experimentation. I mean, good heavens, look at the world these days and how people carry on.’ Pompous. He might still fit into his 30-inch trousers, thought Sandro, but Gorgone was most definitely middle-aged these days. ‘My goodness, it was all very innocent by comparison.’ His eyes went vague again, his mouth clamped shut, deciding, Sandro guessed, against cataloguing drugs consumed or sexual variations experimented with.

  ‘We don’t think,’ Sandro said carefully, ‘that Ms Nielsson was killed down there, in the grounds of La Vipera, a place she hadn’t lived for forty years, by chance or coincidence. How did you get on with the locals? The woman who found the bodies is called Maria Clara Martinelli – do you remember her? Worked in the bar?’ Gorgone shrugged and he went on. ‘Was there anyone with – I don’t know, a grudge against you?’ He paused. ‘Did you have any idea, for example, who contacted us with those … allegations, all that time ago?’

  ‘Unfounded allegations,’ said Gorgone sullenly, then leaned abruptly forwards. ‘None of them could stand us, bloody Tuscan peasants. I can’t remember individuals. They simply disliked us because we were – different.’ He looked down his nose at Sandro, who just nodded and smiled.