The Killing Room (28 page)

‘I think you do,’ she said, answering her own question.

Chapter Twenty-Five

E
NRICO
F
ROLLINI’S TAIL-LIGHTS DISAPPEARED
off down the Via dei Macci, the big car moving gingerly in the narrow, littered street. Luisa felt nothing but relief.

Sexual harassment, she supposed it might be called. Poor Enrico: he wasn’t used to rejection, and it wasn’t like he’d even put a hand on her. Just the sheer persistence of it tired her, the offers, the suggestions, the banter and the pleading look that was replaced with a mournful one. All he wanted from her was an acknowledgement that she harboured a kind of love – more or less any kind, she divined, would do – for him. And she refused.

It was ungrateful, she supposed. It had been nice of him to take her out there and bring her back, but she could have managed, there were taxis. Had it been unfair of Sandro to send her out there, as Frollini had been implying since he made her take the lift? No. She was his partner, she was his co-worker. She wanted that, she didn’t want Frollini’s air-conditioned car and the mistress’s standard pair of diamond earrings every birthday.

‘Your husband said he’d get the car and meet you there.’ He’d looked at her, expectant.

A husband who wouldn’t even pick her up to take her to dinner, had been his subtext. A husband whose car was parked on the ringroad covered in birdshit.

It was quite possible in any case that Frollini had made that bit up himself so he could press her into taking another lift in his leather-lined car. When she’d said no, she needed to go home and change, he’d said, I’ll wait. Quickly adding, outside.
No
, she’d snapped then.
No
. And getting inside her own flat, pushing open the kitchen window and breathing in the ripe, overheated street, Luisa realised that in all the years she’d worked for him she
had
considered the possibility, had comforted herself with the thought of those diamond earrings and his admiration. Or at least, she hadn’t ruled it out – until now.

The Maratti woman had turned her pretty sour: those doilies and traycloths and the stale-smelling kitchen, the effort of trying to make sense of what the woman had said and trying to remember it, and all the time with the awful feeling that something more urgent was nagging for her attention. Something in her gut, that pulled and twisted.

And to have opened the car door and seen Frollini’s expression as he hung up on her husband was the last straw. The thought of what Sandro might have read into the situation made her want to scream at both of them.

Leave me alone. I’ve got more important things to think about than two grown men – old men – bickering like children.

Enzo had called Luisa that afternoon, and left a message.
Do you think she wants out? I’m trying. But she’s here, then she disappears
.

And that was the thing in her gut: Giuli.

Wet from the shower, looking at the kitchen clock – it was seven, she’d need ten minutes in a cab to Fiesole, plenty of time – she called Giuli again. Engaged. She called the house phone, and got Enzo.

‘She’s here,’ he said, sounding ragged. ‘She’s trying to get hold of someone. Some old schoolfriend.’ Luisa was taken aback – who? Enzo went on. ‘She’s having trouble getting through and she’s got a bee in her bonnet, the usual. Look,’ he lowered his voice, ‘don’t tell her I called you this afternoon, all right? Don’t tell her I was worried.’ Then his hand went over the receiver and she heard him call, ‘It’s Luisa, sweetheart.’ Then Giuli was on the phone.

‘Jesus, what a day,’ Giuli said, loud and breathless into the receiver, but there was exhilaration as well as urgency in her voice. ‘Have you talked to Sandro?’

Luisa felt a pulse of panic. ‘Why?’

‘What
were
you doing with Frollini? Out late with him?’

‘Oh, for God’s sake,’ said Luisa. ‘Has anything actually happened? Who’s this friend you’re trying to get hold of?’

Giuli made a sound of frustration Luisa recognised. ‘It might be nothing,’ she said. ‘I was so busy trying to get things straight in my head. I got hung up looking up all the residents in that place online, trying to help Sandro. What a bunch. Vipers, the lot of them.’

‘You’re telling me,’ said Luisa. ‘I was with them all day.’

Giuli wasn’t listening. ‘It’s the girl from last night.’

‘Girl?’

Giuli’s voice was impatient. ‘I never told you. A girl I was at school with was at the unveiling. Elena, her boyfriend . . . oh, never mind. It’s just that she’s not answering her phone, and I wanted to warn her about someone. A guy who’s got a thing for her. An artist. I found something out about him.’

The voice went muffled and Luisa heard her call over her shoulder to placate Enzo, her tone suddenly soft and gentle. Then abruptly she was back, sharp and brisk as ever.

‘It’s probably nothing, like I said. She can look after herself.’ She was distracted.

‘Are you okay?’ Luisa said cautiously. ‘Has something happened? At the Centre?’

‘I haven’t told Enzo yet,’ said Giuli. ‘But I know who’s been telling lies about me.’

Luisa heard the exhilaration in her voice again, and she wasn’t sure if it was a good thing.

‘And what are you going to do?’ She felt suddenly sick with anxiety.

‘I don’t know.’ Her voice was lowered, and Luisa didn’t like it. There were things Enzo didn’t want Giuli to hear, and vice versa.

Again her hand went over the receiver and Luisa heard her say, light and loving, ‘I’ll be right there, sweetheart.’ And she hung up.

*

Where was it? Stopping, perplexed and sweaty in the hot darkness under the ringroad’s trees, Sandro swore softly.

It was three weeks since he’d last used the car. Below the Piazza Beccaria, four lanes of late rush-hour traffic streamed, tail-lights and exhaust fumes spooling their glinting filament around and around the city. He always left the car here, in the same place give or take, because here you didn’t need to move it for road-cleaning, and the
vigili
– the traffic police – left the cars alone on this stretch.

Which was significant, as his resident’s permit had expired. Sandro’s stomach tightened with self-reproach: why am I so useless?
Can’t renew my permits in time, can’t even remember where I left my own car
. What must have happened was, he’d managed to get himself towed, of course he had, even where no one’s been towed in years, because, like all his country’s many and various unspoken agreements, this one could be rescinded at no notice.

Under his feet in the dark last autumn’s dead leaves rustled, waste paper and dogshit, the hot dry smell of summer approaching. And then Sandro stopped and his heart lifted, quite unexpectedly; it soared. A reprieve. The spattered brown roof of his unglamorous, unlauded 1986 Fiat 600 sat humbly patient, between a camper van and an elderly BMW canted over with a flat tyre, waiting for him.

The little engine coughed, turned over and started first time. Sandro resisted the urge to lean and kiss the cracked dashboard in gratitude. The car’s interior breathed out the day’s heat, the crumbs of something long staled on the back seat, warm leatherette, ancient cigarette smoke from the last time he’d given Giuli a lift; he always told her not to, but she would lean out of the window and ignore him. He wished she’d give up.

Craning his neck to see, Sandro pulled into the heavy evening traffic. A pair of headlights moved out for him and, turning back, he let the day out with a long sigh.

Winding down his window, Sandro almost wished for a cigarette himself, as if taking up smoking again after twenty years could bring back that sudden cool clear-headedness of his younger self, that ability to set out his evidence in a row and make sense of it.

Out of uneasy politeness he’d taken half a glass of champagne – the real deal, curved script on an orange label, all the way from the low white hills of northern France – before finally slipping away from the Palazzo, and it had gone to his head. Softened all his thinking, all the order he’d spent the day fighting for, into a sludge.

Therese Van Vleet anxious for her husband. Marjorie Cameron, whose husband was being sued, and who said she’d heard someone in Athene Morris’s room. Sir Martin Fleming, who’d suggested Mauro read Machiavelli.

Magda Scardino, who bartered and haggled over her husband’s brain. What did Parkinson’s do to you? The circuits sparking and flaring, the blood vessels congesting, the nerves hardening like coral?

Magda, who’d been sleeping with Giancarlo Vito.

Lauren Tassi had slipped away quickly. Sandro had seen the sideways glance she’d given Charles Scardino as she’d gone, edging round the small crowd gathered on the terrace. He’d seen a faint smudge of colour appear in the Professor’s sallow face as she passed: Magda had barely turned her head, but she’d registered Tassi’s departure all right. Had she
won? At least Lauren Tassi got to escape from the Palazzo San Giorgio.

The champagne had been for Alessandra Cornell. The man in the silver-framed photograph on her desk had proposed to her, it seemed, that afternoon. He stood there at her side on the terrace, tall, pale, well bred. Alessandra Cornell had had enough. It seemed to Sandro that her decision to jump had a lot to do with climbing into the back of that ambulance with Athene Morris. On the other side of the attaché stood Gastone Bottai, looking murderous.

Cornell was apologising, talking about her notice period, gazing blindly up at her fiancé. Sandro hoped she knew what she was doing. As if on cue, Magda Scardino had nudged into him: had it been her breast that had pushed against his upper arm? He’d smelled her perfume and stepped back, on his guard. Her breast was far enough distant for him not to know, but he’d been caught looking at it. She was wearing a red silk dress whose reflection made her skin glow and gleamed in her hair. She smiled, but it wasn’t friendly.

‘I know what you think of me,’ she said, lightly, not looking at him. ‘Does that surprise you? You and your wife.’

‘Mrs Scardino,’ he said, scenting danger. ‘I am only here to be at your service.’

‘Of course you are,’ she said, turning to him, and she laughed. Sandro had not blushed, he felt, in fifty years. The heat rose under his collar and he remembered all the women last night. Maybe it was the male menopause. A bit late. ‘I didn’t have to pay him, you know. Whatever that little bitch might have said. And we believe in freedom, my husband and I.’

Freedom. Sandro pondered the word. It meant, he realised, almost nothing to him. No such thing. She must have seen his expression.

‘You don’t believe in sexual freedom,’ Magda said. ‘I can see that. But it isn’t against the law, not in this country.’

He bowed just a little. ‘Perhaps I’m just too old,’ he said, ‘to find the idea of freedom exciting.’

‘Oh dear.’ Magda Scardino’s laugh was scornful. ‘How sad. But then you’re a man; men are always so much more . . . timid.’ Was that true? Maybe. ‘Look at Athene – well, even Athene’s old now. But she was worse than me, in her time. More
free
, let’s say. She started with old men and moved on to younger ones.’

‘But without the security of a husband.’

‘Someone paid for her apartment,’ said Magda, shrugging. He wondered if she knew who: he decided she did. ‘We all have a price. Even you, Mr Honest and Upright.’

Sandro looked at her, but she didn’t return his gaze, suddenly busy instead with arranging her dress at the neckline, looking down approvingly at herself. The fact that Athene Morris was lying in a hospital bed, unable to speak or move, was obviously not her concern.

It came to Sandro that Athene Morris had known something, and that was why she was in hospital now. That was why she would soon be dead. ‘Someone told my colleague that Danilo Lludic went to see Miss Morris last night,’ he said.

Magda pulled her head back to get a look at him. ‘Your colleague?’ she said, letting out an abrupt little laugh. Had he made her nervous? ‘You have a whole team at your service?’ Her voice lowered, husky. ‘Are you investigating us?’

For a split second he wondered if he might conceivably have unsettled her, but then she smiled her cat smile, her little sharp teeth showing. ‘Oh, you mean the woman you brought last night.’

‘Giulietta,’ he said. Let her underestimate Giuli if she liked.

‘Well, clever her. Yes, he was up there; I saw him from here.’ She turned and looked up at the façade, Athene Morris’s big second-floor window closed and shuttered now. ‘So I suppose it came on in the middle of the night, after he’d gone. The stroke, or whatever.’

‘Perhaps,’ he said, quietly. ‘Have you heard how she is?

Magda turned back to him, her gaze briefly snagging on someone beyond them. ‘She’s still alive, if that’s what you mean,’ she said, carelessly brutal. Then, more vaguely, ‘Someone visited this afternoon, I think. Apparently the next twenty-four hours will be crucial.’ She shrugged. ‘But really, at her age . . . I mean, you could see it as merciful.’

From someone else’s mouth it might have been acceptable, or to someone else’s ears, but Magda Scardino was one of those women: you wanted to make her pay attention. You wanted to take her by the throat. You wanted to hurt her.

‘Did Vito try to blackmail you, after he’d slept with you?’ Sandro said, trying to keep the anger out of his voice but hearing it thicken.

‘I could have you fired,’ she said, her flecked eyes dark. ‘I didn’t need to pay him for it. Although he did want something from me.’

‘Something more than sex.’ She kept her gaze steady. ‘And did he get it?’

‘He might have done, if Ian Cameron hadn’t got him fired. I was considering my options.’

‘What did he want?’ She just shook her head, so he probed. ‘So you had no reason to wish him . . . ill.’ Dead, was what he meant.

‘Wish Giancarlo ill?’ She laughed lightly and her hair tumbled around her face as her head moved. ‘He was just a baby. Did your wife tell you we didn’t like him?’ A sigh. ‘We adored him. Poor Giancarlo.’

‘And what about that handsome journalist, what was his name, John Carlsson?’ He watched her for a reaction, but there was none. ‘Did you adore him, too?’ She pulled back a little, fixing him, amused. ‘He came here looking for someone a few days ago, didn’t he? Sniffing around. Would you know who he wanted?’