‘Sorry,’ Tiziano had said. ‘Got carried away.’ Cate had extricated herself, knelt beside the wheelchair until her head stopped spinning, while he’d watched her.
‘It’s all right, you know,’ he’d said. ‘Nothing below the waist.’ Cate had blushed furiously; he’d waited till the colour subsided.
‘I wasn’t worried,’ she’d said. He was looking at her with perfect equanimity and she’d thought of Per saying Tiziano can’t be what he seems. The bomb killed his father, on their way to a football match.
‘So what’s he like?’ Tiziano had asked. ‘Our friend from Florence?’
‘He’s nice,’ Cate had said without thinking. ‘He’s like my dad. I mean my stepdad. He’s just doing a job.’
‘Not just here to stir up trouble?’ He’d looked at her. ‘The police don’t think there’s anything to investigate.’ He’d looked around the room. ‘He could ruin someone’s life, you know.’
‘You think, if someone – if it wasn’t an accident, whoever did it shouldn’t be punished?’
Tiziano had put his head on one side, as if considering it. ‘She caused a lot of trouble herself,’ he’d said eventually. ‘A lot of pain.’ He was looking at Alec Fairhead, then at Per in the corner with his wife. ‘I talked to the wife. Per’s wife. They’ve been married twenty-five years and not one moment’s doubt, she said. Neither of them, until Loni Meadows came along. Is any of us as bad as she was?’
‘So she deserved to die?’ Cate had looked fiercely into Tiziano’s face, making him look back. ‘There’s something bad here,’ she’d said, meaning the castle. Their high prison, with its labyrinth of corridors and rooms, and all around the trees clustered close, penning them in, and the lonely, echoing hills.
She’d persisted. ‘Can’t you feel it? The way she died.’ And as he looked back at her coolly she had blinked so as not to think about it, the dark and the cold, tried not to wonder how long it would have taken for Loni Meadows to die.
‘I don’t know,’ he’d said. ‘Perhaps you’re right.’ He’d passed a hand over his stubbled head. ‘Well. Has he got any ideas?’
Cate had shrugged unwillingly. ‘Come on, kid,’ he’d said. ‘You don’t think it was me, do you?’ And smiled sadly.
‘He wants to know who went out that afternoon,’ she had blurted.
Slowly Tiziano had nodded, frowning. ‘That’s interesting. Does he think someone – went and put something there? Like some kind of obstacle? Some kind of tripwire, some kind of trap?’
It had sounded crazy. Cate shrugged uncomfortably. ‘I don’t know. He just asked, did I see anyone go out?’ She had looked at him. ‘Did you?’
‘See anyone?’ She’d waited. ‘Oh,’ he’d said. ‘Did I go out? Well, you know I did, Caterina. I went over to the farm to see the dogs, late afternoon.’
Cate had nodded. ‘Yes, I did know that.’
‘Do you think I need an alibi?’ he’d added cheerfully. ‘Someone to say that’s where I went? Well, you saw me go, but I guess I could have turned and gone the other way out of the back gate. I could have gone towards the river instead of the farm.’ Cate said nothing. ‘Only actually, Mauro saw me. He was there when I arrived. Pissed, though, so he might not remember.’ He’d set his elbows on the arms of his chair and watched her.
‘He was at the farm, and he was drunk?’ Cate had frowned. ‘I thought he was – over on the other side of the valley.’
‘That’s where he was supposed to be?’ Tiziano had shrugged. ‘Well, I wouldn’t want to get Mauro into trouble, but when I saw him, he looked like he hadn’t been anywhere but the bottom of a glass for a good few hours.’
Cate had straightened, thinking furiously, and Tiziano had looked up at her. ‘Are you going to tell him all this, then, our friend from Florence?’ And she’d looked back down at him, unseeing. ‘Whose side are you on, Cate?’ he’d said softly. ‘You’ve got to decide, haven’t you? You’ve got to take a stand.’
And then she had looked into his face, wanting him to tell her what to do, as across the room Alec Fairhead had stepped up to Tina, on the dance floor, and held out his hand to her.
The water in Cate’s shower was running cold. The paracetamol had dulled her headache. She turned off the water and heard voices from outside her window. Michelle and Tiziano were there on the snow; she was in her running gear again, and from the flush in her face Cate guessed she’d already been out. She hadn’t been drinking last night, Cate remembered. In the wheelchair Tiziano was muffled up for once in a padded jacket as he talked to Michelle. From above, his legs looked as thin as sticks under the jogging pants. Cate pulled on her jeans and a sweater and opened the window.
They both looked up at the sound. ‘Good morning, sleeping beauty.’ Tiziano’s good cheer sounded just a bit forced. Embarrassed: about last night. ‘How’s your head?’
‘Hi,’ she said, uncertainly; three days without Loni Meadows, and everything was different. It was as if the roles had all been reversed, the
guests looking after her. And an eerie silence had descended with the snow; even Mauro’s dogs were quiet. Sleeping beauty. ‘I’m fine.’
But there was still a nagging ache, behind the buffer of painkillers; it was just waiting, compounded by guilt. Vincenzo. She hadn’t given him a thought last night. Cate looked at the sky; to the east, it had cleared, and the sun was uncomfortably dazzling. But a new bank of cloud was building to the north.
‘More snow coming, they say,’ said Tiziano. Nodding towards Michelle. ‘She had to get her run in before it kicked off again.’ Michelle smiled down at him, serene, but the look she directed up at Cate was warier.
Since when, thought Cate with a trace of sullen childishness, did Michelle get so full of beans? ‘Where is everyone?’ she asked.
Michelle set her hands on her broad hips, head on one side. Her breath clouding in the cold air. ‘Packing, I guess,’ she said in her harsh accent. Watching Cate for a response.
‘Packing?’ Cate felt herself gawp.
‘Well, we reached a joint decision.’ After she’d gone, no doubt. ‘We figured, we don’t have to stay. We’ll talk to your guy – ’
‘Not my guy,’ said Cate uncomfortably.
‘Whatever.’ She eyed Cate warily. ‘It’s too much, Caterina. We decided, we’ll talk to him, sure we will. But then, that’s it, we’re out of here. Per’s already booked himself on a flight out with Yolanda tomorrow night.’
Cate stared back at her. Shit, she thought, Luca will be in meltdown. And stupidly, what about lunch? Maybe no one cared any more.
‘Does he know?’ she said falteringly. ‘Does Luca know yet?’
‘You want to tell him?’ Michelle smiled. ‘Go ahead, baby. Feel free.’ She gestured at Luca’s window, further down the façade, his shutters open.
Cate stuffed her feet into socks and the boots she’d dug out of the kitchen cupboard. Hair still damp, at least she was clean; but she didn’t feel ready for whatever was coming. And something
was
coming, as sure as the snow.
Banging out of the door she was surprised to see that Michelle and Tiziano were still there, looking down the hill. Close up, Tiziano looked pale.
Cate stopped. ‘Where is he?’ she asked. ‘Has he started yet? Cellini? Has he started talking to people?’
Michelle stamped her feet. ‘He got Alec this morning,’ she said, eyes narrowed. ‘Poor guy.’
‘Mr Fairhead?’ said Cate stupidly. As if she hadn’t watched him dancing with Tina last night, watched him whisper and cry on her shoulder. Watching while he tried not to look at Per and his wife, kissing in the dark, and poured out his heart to her.
‘What do you mean, poor guy? What did he say?’
‘Don’t ask me,’ said Michelle toughly. ‘None of my business. He was white as a sheet, though. I was just getting ready for my run and I heard him. Wandering about in the trees; I came out to see if he was OK, only he walked on down. Going to see Tina, he said.’
Tina. Cate tried to get her head around that one.
‘Where is he?’ she said. ‘Where is he now?’ She looked up at Luca’s window. Shit, she thought; she had a job to do.
‘Alec? He’s with Tina. I just said.’ Michelle frowned.
‘Not him,’ said Cate. ‘I meant, where’s Cellini?’
‘Ah,’ said Michelle. ‘Him. Right. I saw him, on my run.’
‘Your friend from Florence,’ said Tiziano, and his teasing grated on her for the first time.
‘He’s a good man,’ she said fiercely. ‘You’d do well to remember that.’
‘All right,’ said Tiziano, surprised by her vehemence, holding up his hands in surrender. ‘All right, whatever you say. Your good man – he’s down at the river, throwing stones.’
T
HE COLD AND WET seeped up through Sandro’s boots and as far as his ankles, but he didn’t care. He was out of the Castello Orfeo, at least for the moment, standing in what he might before this weekend have avoided like the plague: open countryside, not a roof in sight, not a chimney.
He was at the foot of the hill where Loni Meadows had died. Around him the wide hills lay soft and white and silent and alien, merging with the pale sky at the horizon, the snow-laden trees on a nearby ridge motionless. After the deep damp chill and dark corridors of the Castello Orfeo, Sandro felt as though his lungs were expanding properly for the first time since his arrival, and even though he knew that the purple cloud was massing again at his back, overhead the sun shone out of a band of electric blue sky. The temperature must have risen just fractionally, because on the road down the tarmac had been beginning to show black through snow, and the noise of the chains had echoed round the hills until he thought they must all be at the windows of the castle, watching him. But where Sandro stood now, in the lee of the slope where the sun didn’t reach, the cold was shocking.
The sound of the running woman had taken him by surprise. At first, it had even alarmed him; he had thought it must be an animal.
Deer? Wild boar? In the crusted snow beside the road there had been tracks, delicate splayed bird feet, and the rounded depressions of a small cloven hoof. A tiny cluster of droppings, black on the pristine verge. Sandro’s understanding of wild animals was restricted to the manner in which they might be cooked, and he didn’t relish the prospect of coming face to face with one.
Since pulling up carefully in the car, he had spent the first five minutes just standing and orienting himself in the wide and barren landscape, and he judged that the furrowed track over the hill where she first came into view would have led around from the back of the castle, down to the left where the outbuildings stood among the trees. Michelle Connor, her skin flushed bright from the exercise and the cold. She didn’t seem even faintly disturbed to see him, but nor did she pause. She approached through the snow, stepping high; it must, he thought, be a track that was used by humans, animals, or both, for the snow already to have been trodden down at all. She reached the road and expertly leapt a shallow ditch on to the dark strip of visible tarmac, turned and was gone. Away from him. He had watched as she moved away, steady, strong, the muscles in the backs of her legs pumping. She hadn’t looked back.
Sandro knelt at the river’s edge and felt for another stone, a smooth, rounded one, fitting in the palm of his hand. He threw it; tried to imagine it was dark. Or had the headlights still been on, casting their beam into the undergrowth? It landed with a splash, perhaps eight, ten metres away.
Talking to Alec Fairhead had not been like talking to Orfeo, although Sandro had felt himself to be in possession of even greater certainties as he climbed the stairs wearily, his head thick with lack of sleep, and his stomach sour with reluctance. From behind Orfeo’s door as he passed, there had come the sounds of confident movement, brisk and assured. That would be typical; but Sandro no longer cared about Niccolò Orfeo. He would be glad never to see the man again; he would be delighted when he was out of his big brute of a house for good.
It had taken Alec Fairhead – Alexander Fairhead, born in London in 1954, educated at Harrow School, novelist and travel writer, veteran
of such far-flung and dangerous places as Afghanistan and Colombia – a long five minutes to respond to Sandro’s knock. Sandro had sat and waited on an oddly shaped wooden chair, so like something he’d seen in the Uffizi that he wasn’t sure if sitting on it was allowed. He had knocked again, and sat back. Had thought of the Uffizi with yearning; of the long windows, the wedge of the long grey courtyard with the tower of the Palazzo Vecchio rising out of it, a symbol of civilization. Then, reluctantly, had thought of the awful little book he had struggled through before he could finally lay his head on the pillow and sleep; Alec Fairhead’s first and only novel,
Unborn
.
Sandro read the newspaper religiously but he was not and had never been a reader of stories. Luisa was the one who sat and read novels, a stack of them beside the bed; she wanted words, she wanted characters, she wanted those structures with happy endings, or endings at least. Closure. But even Luisa would have hated this book; especially Luisa, she would have hated it. It would have made her cry. He had no idea whether this was a good book or not, whether the fact that it might have the power to make a thoughtful woman cry meant that it was good. It had won a prize, and from what was written on the back, it had many admirers.
It was about a man who fell in love with a woman who left him, and aborted his child. The man was called Edward Grant. Edward was Eduardo in Italian. It had been written in 1982. These were the things Sandro concentrated on; literary criticism was not called for, even if he had been capable of it. But there was something about the stiff, pained writing that he recognized.
The door had opened and Fairhead’s face had stared down at him: gaunt, unshaven, but not surprised. Not frightened, either. Sandro had thought he might be frightened, but then sometimes it came as a relief, to certain kinds of offender, to be found out. To stop having to pretend.
‘Come in,’ Fairhead had said. He had sounded tired; he was wearing a sweatshirt with nothing under it and loose trousers, and his feet were bare.
After finishing the book, just to make sure, Sandro had gone back to the little chart Giuli had made him. Between 1981 and 1982 Loni
Meadows, married by then, had been on a visiting Fellowship at the Courtauld Institute in central London; a part of London University, very close, it appeared from the information he had subsequently obtained within seconds from the campus’s official website, to University College, London, where Alec Fairhead had been registered as studying for a Doctorate in English Literature between 1979 and 1982.
Loni Meadows’s Fellowship at the Courtauld had ended in June 1982; she took up another at Columbia University, New York, that September but she must have left London for America almost immediately.
There was a record of her winning an award for her reviewing for the
New York Times
. Her awards were listed on her website, and her journalism enthusiastically described, using terms like ‘savage’ and ‘coruscating’. It had not occurred to Sandro, revisiting it, that no one would have bothered to update Loni Meadows’s website: it was a shock. The bright blue eyes in the same photograph she had submitted to the Trust in her application shone from the corner of the screen;
Loni Meadows is engaged in projects in southern Tuscany
,
but she continues to review widely
.
The room had been warm and gloomy and the air stale and sour. Fairhead had opened the shutters and the influx of damp cold had seemed to sharpen them both.
In the light, the room had been revealed as exceptionally neat. All doors firmly closed on wardrobe, cupboard, bedside table; a laptop, turned off, its screen folded flat, dead centre of a desk between the small windows. It would have been a maid’s room once; Orfeo’s forebears might have made their way up here to inflict their bullying needs on their social inferiors; not much change there, then. Even as Sandro had thought as much, from far below, at the front of the castle where Orfeo had parked, there had come the unmistakable roar of that powerful car. Good riddance.
Sandro had crossed to the window and looked down. The avenue of cypresses dipped straight down the hill below towards the road, each one twenty metres high at least, black spears topped with white. Not as carefully maintained as they might be; the weight of the snow
was beginning to splay them. One factotum wasn’t really enough, for a place like this; Luca Gallo had a lot on his plate.
You couldn’t see the road or the river clearly from up here; you could see the horizon, hills one behind the other, but closer to, the river, like the strip of tarmac, wound and dipped behind the undulations of the landscape. You couldn’t see the place where Loni Meadows had died.
Feeling Alec Fairhead hovering at his back, Sandro had turned to face him. He hadn’t wanted to beat about the bush. ‘You were in Paris last year,’ he had said. ‘April last year.’ And abruptly Fairhead had sat, at his desk, set his hands flat on the leather surface.
‘I was,’ he had said, and his voice had been steady. He’d been waiting for this; he wanted to be found out. Start from the beginning, Sandro had thought.
‘You had an affair with Loni Meadows, nearly thirty years ago,’ he had said. ‘Which ended – badly. You wrote a book about it.’
‘I did,’ Fairhead had said, his voice very quiet, but still firm.
‘You never got over it, did you?’ Sandro had said softly. And Fairhead had shaken his head quickly, just once. ‘Until now,’ he had said.
‘You hadn’t got over it last April, when you sent an email to the Orfeo Trust from an internet café at four in the morning. Edward Grant, whose girlfriend aborted his child in 1982, is Eduardog82. Is you.’
Fairhead had put his face in his hands.
‘You wanted her to know, didn’t you? You hid yourself behind a proxy server, but somewhere deep down you wanted her to know it was you.’
His face still in his hands, Fairhead had moved his head from side to side before raising it to look at Sandro. ‘I read about her appointment in the
THES
, would you believe it?’ Sandro had had no idea what this publication was, so he just waited. Seeing his polite blankness, Fairhead had explained. ‘For universities, a newspaper.
Times Higher Education Supplement
. I had given a lecture at the Sorbonne, and I was sitting in a brasserie in Montparnasse with a beer and I opened the paper and read about university appointments, that kind of thing. I read a review of one of Per’s plays, actually.’
His hands had rested on the arms of the chair, searching Sandro’s face for something as he spoke. Needing him to understand something.
‘I was – at ease. I don’t know if you – well, perhaps you will understand, but I don’t relax all that often. It’s rare for me to feel as I was feeling then; it was a warm spring evening, the beer was cold, there was even some kind of tree in flower on the boulevard.’ He had taken a breath. ‘I had been told not long before that I had been accepted for a stint here, and I have always loved Italy. Even though – well. When I met Loni, you see, there was nothing Italian about her; she was a clever girl from the Midwest. Sitting in that brasserie I knew she was married to an Italian but I didn’t associate Italy with her. I thought it might be the thing – the experience that got me back on track.’ His face had dropped. ‘Even though that seemed to get less likely each year.’
‘Back on track?’
‘Writing,’ he had said. ‘Proper writing. I couldn’t write after – the book. After
Unborn
. Only hack stuff.’ Sandro had looked at him questioningly. ‘Journalism. Travel. It was never what I wanted to write.’
‘The work was what mattered to you? Not – other things?’ Not a family, not – children? The man hadn’t been even thirty: were there really people who put off those things, in favour of something like writing?
Alec Fairhead had looked away, pained. ‘I thought they would follow on, you see. I thought, I had to get the work right first. Then I would do the living.’
‘And then you read the announcement of Loni Meadows’s appointment. ’
Fairhead had nodded. ‘I finished the beer, then I had another one. That didn’t work. Then I went back to the hotel, and I couldn’t sleep. It was hot and stuffy, and my head ached, and I tried to think about the lecture I’d given because it had gone well – but nothing worked. Everything had turned to – shit.’
The word had been deliberately ugly.
‘So you went to an internet café.’
Fairhead’s shoulders had dropped, and slowly he had nodded. ‘Just one,’ he had said. ‘Just one email. I thought I could disguise
it: I knew about proxy servers from a piece I wrote about Indian call centres.’ He had breathed out slowly. ‘I could feel myself losing it, the things I wrote, but I couldn’t stop myself. I had to send it quickly before I changed my mind. And then of course I did change my mind, but it was too late.’
Sandro had pulled up a chair and sat at the corner of the desk.
‘But you came, anyway,’ he had said. ‘You could have resigned your tenure here. Given your place to someone else.’
There had been a silence. ‘I could,’ Alec Fairhead had said. ‘Perhaps I should have.’ He had twisted his neck as if he was in pain, his few clothes suffocating him. ‘I did write a letter,’ he had said eventually. ‘Asking to be excused, some family reasons, but when I looked at it it seemed – so pathetic. So cowardly. I tore it up; I told myself it might be – I don’t know. Fate.’
‘Do you know why I’m here?’ Sandro had asked, after a silence.
‘I – I think so,’ Fairhead had said uncertainly.
‘That email brought me here.’ And Fairhead’s face had grown paler, the shadows under his eyes darker. ‘Loni Meadows’s husband is a man called Giuliano Mascarello,’ Sandro had said. ‘And he thinks that whoever sent that email also brought about his wife’s death.’
That hadn’t been enough. ‘He thinks whoever sent that email killed her.’