The Killing Room (5 page)

Then again, working for Sandro did something for her nothing else did, and it gave her a pang to hear Luisa say, of
this fancy house-detective deal,
a real job
. Like their little office wasn’t, with its battered computer and filing cabinet with the drawer that stuck, and her three mornings spent exchanging gossip with Sandro and listening to him moan about the modern world while weeding out his inbox. People were beginning to hear about them, too, not just Sandro but her as well. And what about the old ladies who wanted them to find a long-lost grandson, last heard of washing up in Treviso, or catch their neighbour putting down poison for the cat?

Plus, she needed a distraction. Turning her back to the window display of Dream Bride, Giulietta Sarto set off south, towards the Centre and an afternoon of wrangling women who’d turned crazy for one good reason or another. There’d be a solution.

*

Sandro paused at the foot of the Costa San Giorgio, where it came out on to the river through a wide, low arch. He’d left the attaché’s office above him on the hillside but he couldn’t shake the feeling he’d had in that bright room, of things unsaid, whispers and secrets, just out of earshot. He put his phone away in his pocket and leaned there, looking. On the opposite bank the lofty elegance of the Uffizi’s arcaded frontage was thronged with people, and underneath it the bright fluttering flags danced on the souvenir stalls in the noon sunshine. He pushed himself off the rough stone of the arch’s pillar and set off down the Borgo San Jacopo towards San Frediano, and the office.

He hadn’t told Luisa the full story, just that the job was his, if he wanted it. She could hear him keeping something back, of course, but Luisa was a strategist, she was biding her time.

Was she pleased? He’d known his wife since they were nineteen and twenty-one, but Sandro Cellini still found it hard to second-guess her reaction to anything, even something she’d engineered herself. And now the boot was on the other foot; now he might find himself talking
her
into it, once she knew this wasn’t exactly the smart suit and sinecure she wanted for him. More like a poisoned chalice.

Alessandra Cornell was so discreet it had seemed to cause her physical pain to give him any information at all about the circumstances under which the job was suddenly his, and the fear had still been there, in the way she hadn’t been able to keep her hands still.

‘I need to know the situation here, that’s all,’ Sandro had said, soothingly. ‘I need to know if I’m the man for the job, and what I’m walking into. You understand? If I’m to help. Perhaps you could start from the beginning. When did he start?’

Alessandra Cornell sat up, her shoulders taut. He felt sorry for her.

‘We were all agreed, he was just what we . . . the Palazzo needed.’ She spoke hurriedly. ‘He fitted the image, he was young, smart, eager, and he said he could start straight away.’

Sandro cleared his throat, aware of his own distinct lack of eagerness. ‘His agency was okay with that?’

She looked surprised. ‘As far as I know. You know them? The Stella D’Argento. It must have been okay because he was in the next day. And the clients all seemed to like him.’

‘How many are there?’ Sandro got to his feet and she looked up, startled. He took a step towards the long windows, then another. He could see out. A maid was setting out loungers on a lower terrace. ‘In residence? Let’s say, since Vito arrived.’

‘Well, when we roll out, we hope there’ll be at least twice as many—’ She caught his eye. ‘But just now, there are four couples and one single, two if you count our artist in residence. They were all at the launch.’

Mentally Sandro made a quick tally. The Australians. The tall Professor and his big-spending wife, who liked men to look at her – Scardino? Therese, whose name he still hadn’t forgotten, her little dog, and her brick-faced husband. So there would be another couple he hadn’t identified, plus the singles. Athene Morris would be one.

‘I met the Camerons,’ said Sandro mildly, pondering the other single. Artist in residence. It could only be him: the big guy at the bar, whose chat-up routine Sandro had walked into. ‘So what went wrong?’

She frowned down at her hands. ‘Small things,’ she said. ‘To begin with, anyway. Small unpleasant things. Spiteful. A bracelet of Miss Morris’s disappeared from her room, she was very upset.’

Sandro tried to imagine the fierce old woman upset: it was an oddly painful thought.

‘Sentimental value, she said. The maid resigned, Giancarlo seemed quite sure she’d done it, but the bracelet wasn’t found. Dog’s mess smeared on skirtings and on a door. The steam room was locked with a guest inside. A child’s tricks, although they got worse.’

‘How much worse?’

She raised her head. ‘The dog,’ she said. ‘We never should have allowed the dog. We made an exception—’ She faltered.

‘What happened to the dog?’

‘We don’t know,’ said Cornell, fidgeting, looking down. ‘It – he – the dog disappeared.’

He felt it then: the little surge in the blood. Not dead yet, said some little ticking in the prostate. That dog had been the start of it, at the launch. That young woman’s distress – holding the soaking animal heedless of her expensive dress – had been the only real thing there. Disappeared.

‘The dog,’ he said. ‘At the launch, wasn’t there . . . didn’t something happen to the dog at the party? Fell down a well?’

She frowned. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘But that was . . . we sorted that out. The gardening team we’d had in the day before, they admitted they’d neglected to secure the cover. Well, eventually they did. It was an accident.’

An accident. ‘You checked the well when the dog went missing?’

She drew herself up. ‘Of course.’

Sandro turned, thinking, found himself gazing through the long window and almost immediately stepped back. A couple in late middle age, a stocky man and his grey-haired wife, were walking slowly to the terrace under Cornell’s window. The diplomat Marina Artusi was besotted with, Sandro guessed. Luisa had filled him in. Based in the Middle East, she’d said; he must have seen some action, these past twenty years. As Sandro watched, the man leaned down, solicitous, to help his wife sit, and she looked back up at him. Even from this distance her
smile transformed her thin face. She looked almost transparent in the sunshine: a lifetime away from any kind of home clearly took its toll.

He turned back to Alessandra Cornell, feeling like a voyeur.

‘Four couples, two singles, then,’ he said. ‘And what about staff? The domestic staff? How many are there?’

Again the spots of colour appeared on her cheeks. ‘Well, at the moment we’re working on minimal staffing—’

‘It’s all right,’ he said patiently, ‘I’m not a client.’

‘A doorman – Lino – eleven till midnight, with breaks of course, but the guests have their keys, this isn’t a hotel. We’re looking for a second doorman.’ She hurried on. ‘There’s a barman. Again, we will eventually need a second, but Mauro is very capable.’ Sandro felt a pang for Lino with his thin shoulders, not so capable. ‘Two maids, mornings only unless we have a function. Last night, for example, they were serving drinks, and the same tonight.’

Sandro nodded, feeling the numbers settle in his head. Out on the terrace the maid straightened, turned and looked back up, shading her eyes. Italian, for which he was relieved. In a place like this they might well employ exclusively foreigners, and he was already worn out speaking another language.

‘All trustworthy, naturally?’ He smiled. ‘Except the girl who resigned, I suppose.’ He spoke mildly. ‘Although of course the incidents continued after her departure, so perhaps . . .’ He shrugged. ‘And Vito couldn’t work out what was going on?’

Cornell twisted her fingers together. ‘He never seemed to take it very seriously. His approach was to go around talking to guests, smoothing things over, but he didn’t actually get to grips
with why or how these things were happening. It was unsettling. Even I found it so. But Giancarlo just played it down.’

‘And you – you gave him an ultimatum?’

She shifted uneasily. ‘Not exactly,’ she said. ‘Gastone supported him, said his approach was the right one. We let him go because one of the guests put in a complaint about him.’

She fidgeted. He waited. Eventually she said, ‘There was a woman. A woman was . . . brought in, by one of the guests.’ She took a breath. ‘A prostitute. Giancarlo took no action; he was even seen at the door with her as she left.’

‘Seen by whom?’

‘Mr Cameron made the complaint,’ she said.

Cameron. The Australian who bullies his wife. ‘Do you know which guest she was – ah – visiting?’

Alessandra Cornell’s face looked frozen. Silently she shook her head. ‘I was under the impression I was interviewing you, Mr Cellini,’ she managed eventually.

‘Look,’ said Sandro, feeling sorry for her. ‘Signorina Cornell. I don’t know if that means you want me to take over. All I can say is, I don’t believe in ghosts. Or poltergeists, or evil spirits, or for that matter in smoothing things over. It seems more practical to look for answers in the real world.’

She gazed back at him, wanting to believe she’d found her saviour.

‘I’m sure we can sort this out,’ he said, and cursed himself.

So he was going to accept. The traffic of the Via Maggio behind him was heading for the bridge and he paused, enjoying the cool the Via Santo Spirito always harboured, perpetually oblique to the fierce sunlight as it was. He felt in his pocket
for his phone, but didn’t remove it.
Call Giuli
, Luisa had said.

If Sandro had to pick a street where he felt Florence was fully itself – and therefore fully his – it would be this one. Big silent palaces, the ancient possessions of the Frescobaldi and the Capponi and the rest; their discretion, unlike the ersatz, bought-in version Alessandra Cornell was installing at the Palazzo San Giorgio, was absolute. Centuries of iron will, taste, ruthlessness and money, these palaces opened their doors only to their own: their shutters were closed, their gardens were hidden. Could she manage that for her clients? She could try.

It had only occurred to him as he was leaving to ask where he would actually be working. ‘I mean, did Vito spend all day patrolling the premises?’ They were standing in the doorway to Cornell’s office. ‘Or is there somewhere I can sit down, now and again?’ He cursed himself for sounding like an old man, and added, ‘Do – ah – paperwork?’

Wearily apologetic, she had taken a little bunch of keys from her drawer – a couple of brass ones, a Yale, a plastic card, a bigger silver key – and led him to a tiny corner room beyond the library. She’d unlocked it and held the jingling bunch out to him by the key she’d used, the Yale. A gesture of faith. Taking them, he was agreeing, and he knew it.

The room was barely big enough to accommodate the desk and narrow bed it contained, with a single slit-window looking on to another wall. He saw Cornell glance quickly around as if looking for something, but the room was empty except for a brochure on the desk about the Palazzo. Sandro had picked it up, registered Cornell watching him. ‘May I?’ She had nodded, unresisting, and he had put it in his briefcase.

Locking the door behind him, he’d had a sudden urge to run, down the corridor and into the daylight and the fresh air; he’d had to force himself to shake her hand and walk away. He could feel her eyes on his back all the way.

Now Sandro walked on, deeper into the silence of the Via Santo Spirito, savouring the air of the streets, a breeze off the river. Enough. It would be interesting. His mobile was still in his pocket; there’d be no point in dialling Giuli’s number because there was no signal here, nor anywhere along the canyoned streets he’d walked that ran parallel to the river on the south, from the Via San Niccolò to the Borgo San Frediano. Perhaps that was why he liked them; unlike most of his countrymen, Sandro had never embraced the mobile phone, not even the new one Luisa and Giuli had talked him into having, with internet and all that. He didn’t see it as a boon but a ball and chain. While his phone couldn’t make contact with its mothership, he was hidden here, as protected as the satisfied
borghesi
behind their massive doors.

What was it Giuli had told him, just the other day? That with the clever phone, the magic phone with its touchscreen and Bluetooth and global positioning, they knew where you were. And not only that, but from the moment you first turned it on, a file was created, tracking your movements, stacking up numbers, co-ordinates, transactions, spooling them out endlessly in cyberspace. She’d had to stop him chucking the thing into the river on the spot. Since when did Giuli get so trusting?

‘It’s good,’ she’d insisted, looking at him wide-eyed. ‘Information’s always good, right?’ It might have been Luisa speaking,
whom tough-talking streetwise Giuli covertly worshipped; his honest wife who had nothing to fear because she knew she was both innocent and right, who had fought off the cancer in her breast because she believed in staring information in the face. And he was just paranoid, with his ‘they’.

Phone still in hand, he turned down the Via Maffia, brighter, warmer, wider, lined with carriage entrances. The Via Maffia was where the great families had kept their stables, and every façade was dominated by a massive arched doorway, wide enough to admit a coach and four, vast iron rings at regular intervals along the street front. Here he could use the mobile, but he didn’t. Sandro kept walking as the streets grew sunnier, the houses grew humbler, and the squawking of neighbours arguing across their balconies announced San Frediano, district of fishwives and thieves and artisans.

He stopped halfway down the Via del Leone on the eastern side and looked at the brass nameplate that he’d only just got around to paying for, after four years operating out of this shabby street. Fishwives, thieves, artisans – and
Sandro Cellini, Investigations
.

*

Am I being selfish? thought Luisa Cellini, waiting at the table her boss had booked at the small restaurant behind the straw market.

Life’s too short, sometimes. She imagined the two of them out there in the city, her husband, her not-exactly child, Giuli. Shoving them into things was second nature; she knew this
would be good for Giuli – but for Sandro? There was the significant possibility that he’d hate every minute of it. She wondered what he’d think, for example, of the charming Martin Fleming. Sir Martin, although he’d refused to allow them to call him that. There was also the possibility that Sandro was, as he was always complaining, too old – too old for change, and too old to be someone else’s employee. However charming.