The Killing Room (3 page)

At the lower edge of the terrace a young woman – blackhaired and pale with shock, but beautiful – was holding up a small, soaking-wet dog under her chin, murmuring to it. Gastone Bottai was trying to soothe her while the other man – her husband, Sandro would have said, from the body language – blond and brick-faced, was shouting, in American-accented English. ‘For Christ’s sake,’ he was saying. ‘A well? What kind of a Third World outfit is this, Bottai? Why didn’t it have a – a – some kind of a cover on it? I mean, Jesus, Therese might have gone down after him.’

The woman’s head was lowered, her white cheek pressed against the shivering dog. The fine fabric of her evening gown was soaked where she held the animal against her. Therese.

Bottai was murmuring, all apologies and disclaimers, evading responsibility already. Sandro could hear him. And then another man was there among them, his hand on the woman’s shoulder. Therese, thought Sandro again, mesmerised by her welling blue eyes. Then he saw that the third man, his broad hand so familiarly placed on the beautiful woman’s back, was Giancarlo Vito.

Experiencing an odd kind of shock at the sight, Sandro sidestepped, moving on, down to where they’d come from, an instinct propelling him into the dark below. And if it hadn’t been for the presence of another man already there, he might have walked into the well himself.

‘Jesus,’ he exclaimed, teetering on the edge of a circular void, perhaps a metre in diameter. He was grateful for the stranger’s arm holding him back.

‘Right,’ said the man, in accented Italian. ‘Lethal, huh?’ Another American: tallish, dark, lean.

Sandro stepped back; the American let him go, and they both looked down. You couldn’t see the water but you could smell it, cold and mineral and mossy.

‘There must be a cover,’ said Sandro, kneeling. The American turned, bent down and tugged at something. It grated and Sandro leaned across to help. It was heavy; it took the two of them to shift it.

‘Negligent, at the least, wouldn’t you say?’ The American’s voice was light. ‘It’s not like they were showing the thing off, it’s not illuminated. This isn’t any wishing well.’ The man sat back on his heels.

‘I don’t know,’ said Sandro, warily.

The American held out a hand. It was his night for formal introductions, thought Sandro, looking around as his eyes adjusted to the light. Why
had
the well been uncovered?

‘John Carlsson,’ said the man, the hand still proffered.

Sandro took it. ‘Cellini,’ he said, hoping for anonymity.

‘The detective,’ said Carlsson. ‘Sandro Cellini, right? Business or pleasure?’

Sandro’s shoulders dropped. ‘It’s certainly not pleasure,’ he said. ‘I don’t know what I’m doing here, to tell the truth.’ Rising to his feet, he tugged at his collar, stifled, and feeling his balance go in the dark, took a step back.

The American stood too, and looked up towards the candlelit façade. ‘I’m supposed to be writing the evening up,’ he said. ‘Our Miss Cornell will be sweet-talking me before you know it, not to mention this little incident.’ Sandro looked at him blankly. ‘I’m a journalist,’ said Carlsson. ‘This was only meant to be a nice puff piece.’

‘And now you’re going to write about a dog falling in the well?’

The man gave him a sardonic look. ‘And the rest,’ he said. ‘If I was of a mind to cause her trouble.’

‘Such as?’ Despite himself, Sandro was caught.

‘Like that room they found, digging out their gym, or whatever.’ Sandro drew himself up, attentive, but the man had moved on. ‘And as for this lot. You go along thinking, well, free champagne, all these charming wealthy people.’ He clapped Sandro on the shoulder. ‘Only, when you look closely at them, some of them turn out to be not so charming after all; they’ve made their money in pretty unglamorous places, or doing rather ugly things. And they buy themselves a nice cover story and an attaché and private security.’

Sandro wondered what his game was, all these hints, nothing concrete. ‘Room?’ he said, dogged. Too old to follow hares, whoever set them running. ‘What room did they find?’

Carlsson snorted. ‘You’re very thorough, aren’t you, Sandro Cellini? The room’s not really my point.’

‘All the same,’ said Sandro. ‘Humour me.’

‘It had been bricked up in the foundations. A – a chamber.’ The journalist was looking up the hill. ‘You’ve seen the exhibition, Mediaeval Instruments of Torture? It’s very popular with the tourists: the Virgin of Nuremberg, all that. The chamber was empty when they found it, more or less, and it’s God knows how old, centuries, though no doubt down the generations it found its uses.’

The cold metallic smell of the water from down in the earth was still in the air, and Sandro felt queasy, his stomach still sour. He took a step back. ‘So are you going to do something about it?’ he asked. ‘All these dubious characters. Are you that kind of journalist?’

In the dark beside him Carlsson’s teeth flashed in a broad grin. ‘We all start out wanting to be that kind of journalist,’ he said. ‘We grow up, we take the money instead. That’s the theory anyway.’

And then he heard Luisa’s voice, calling him. Turning to look up, he saw her, stepping daintily down the path in her party shoes, his saviour.

‘Where on earth did you get to?’ she said, coming breathlessly to a halt. ‘We’ve been looking for you.’

‘Can we go now?’ Sandro said, more loudly than he intended. Luisa groaned. ‘What?’ he said.

‘I do hope we’re not keeping you,’ said Alessandra Cornell, emerging into view from behind Luisa.

Sandro turned to look for John Carlsson, but he had disappeared.

Chapter Two

I
T HAD TAKEN
L
UISA
a good twenty-four hours to forgive him. With not a single client since February, Sandro needed all the contacts he could get; he could live without managing to antagonise the rich and well connected.

The morning after, Luisa hadn’t been surprised, and she told him as much. ‘I don’t know why I bother,’ she said. ‘Why couldn’t you have just been civil? If you accept someone’s hospitality,’ and he’d grunted at that, because they both knew he’d like to have been given the opportunity not to accept any such thing, ‘you should be gracious about it. Just because they’re wealthy doesn’t make them bad people.’

And before he’d had a chance to wonder at her vehemence, she’d gone to work without her coffee.

So the wealthy residents of the Palazzo San Giorgio had settled discreetly into their first few weeks of cocooned luxury. John Carlsson had written his puff piece for a foreign newspaper – Sandro knew that because Luisa had brought it home from work. Scanning the article, he found it only anodyne, so he
assumed the hunt must have gone elsewhere. Once or twice Sandro did think of Giancarlo Vito too, with his charming smile and his cybercrime expertise, and he wondered. But the last thing Sandro needed was a reminder that he was down to his own last coffee-spoonful of testosterone and more ignorant of hard drives than the average eight-year-old, so he pushed the thought away. And by the time they heard from Alessandra Cornell again it was halfway through a scorching May, and the evening had turned into the fading memory of one more social occasion on which Sandro had shown his wife up and sabotaged his own professional chances.

So there was something shamefaced as well as gleeful about the way Luisa marched in to the kitchen, dropped her handbag on the table and announced, more than a month after what they both viewed as a debacle, ‘Guess who dropped by the shop this evening, asking for you?’

Sandro knew better than to say anything. He smiled warily.

‘Alessandra Cornell.’ She sat down, and Sandro could see the glow of the day’s heat in her cheeks. ‘The woman from the Palazzo San Giorgio.’

‘The attaché,’ said Sandro. ‘Asking for me? I have an office, don’t I?’

Luisa gave him a sidelong look. ‘And you were there all day, were you?’

Sandro shifted uneasily, then stood up to go and stir the sauce he was making: tuna and olives. He’d never been known to even reheat a pizza, but after a month of idleness at the office, of watching Luisa coming home from work, the sole breadwinner, and straight away putting on her apron, he’d
decided that perhaps he’d better get his act together. Luisa had needed to bite her tongue a couple of times when he’d got it wrong, but she had surrendered the ground once or twice a week.

He switched off the gas and went back to the table. ‘I might have nipped out for a coffee. To the market.’ He gave in. ‘She came to the office?’

Luisa smiled; she was good at regaining the high ground. She shook her head. ‘Phoned. I said you’d have been out on a job and would have the mobile off.’

So Alessandra Cornell had been looking for him. He thought of her expensive vanilla-pale hair, and her condescension, and had to admit to being gratified.

‘You’re going to see her at ten tomorrow morning,’ said Luisa, which wiped the smile off his face.

Chapter Three

T
HE MAN WAS NAKED.
He was kneeling like one of the very devout or a beggar, his face between his knees, his great shoulders humped and his arms out. His head was down between his knees, his hands were palms uppermost and he was dead. Twelve hours, or thereabouts: there was mottling and discolouration where the fluids had collected, and in the late-spring heat the tissues had begun minutely to bloat and swell. Where his face was pressed sideways against the rug, it was stained darkish.

‘It’s all mine,’ she said from the doorway, arms folded, her mouth turned down in disgust. The
carabiniere
lifted his head from his examination of a lividity at the back of the man’s neck to look at her, a woman old enough to be his grandmother. You wouldn’t want a grandmother like this one. ‘The rug,’ she said. ‘He took it fully furnished. Who’ll pay for the damages? God knows what he’s done to my bathroom. I can hear everything that goes on, you know.’

‘And what did you hear?’

She peered down unashamed at the pale soles of the man’s feet, the shadow of his genitals between them.

‘I thought he’d gone away on holiday,’ she said. ‘I saw him go yesterday afternoon. He must have come back.’

‘You didn’t see him last night? Hear him?’

‘I was out,’ she said. ‘I went to see my sister.’ Outraged at the missed opportunity: spying on her tenant better than the telly, no doubt.

But thinking him away, she’d let herself in to snoop this morning, early.

The dead man would have been roughly the
carabiniere
’s own age, late twenties, a good fifteen kilos heavier but all of it muscle, stiffened now into dead meat. There was a stink in the room, pungent, unmistakable, of a body in extremis. The young
carabiniere
sat back on his heels a moment, waiting for his stomach to settle. He didn’t want to throw up in front of the old woman. He looked at the bookshelf – a couple of fat dog-eared paperbacks on it and a cheap-looking trophy on its side – registered the dusty blinds, the stale smell from the kitchen. She probably charged through the nose for this dump.

There was a crosstrainer in the corner of the room, Lycra training gear over the back of the dingy armchair. If he’d walked past this man in the street, would he have felt a twinge of envy at the outline of perfectly worked muscle? He could hear his partner downstairs, on the radio talking to forensics. They’d been and gone, would be coming back again. The bathroom needed a closer look.

The dead man’s landlady was waiting.

‘You’ll have taken a deposit?’ he said, and her mouth set in a line.

‘Not enough,’ she said. ‘If I’d known what – what kind he was, I’d have taken double.’

‘We don’t know what he was,’ said the
carabiniere
. They both looked down at the traces of powder scattered on the rug; there was other stuff in the bathroom. Steroids, as far as he could tell, and a modest few grams of coke. She’d been in with her passkey, and had a good sniff around. Not for a second did she seem to register that the stiffened thing on the rug had once been human.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said gently. ‘We’re going to have to ask you to stay out of the apartment until we’re done.’ Shutting the stable door, but still. ‘And of course we’ll need your prints.’

‘This is my house,’ she spat.

‘Yes,’ said the
carabiniere
, quite calm. ‘And this is a crime scene.’

After a long moment, she turned away. Before she’d got to the bottom of the stairs, he had his head in the scale-encrusted toilet bowl and was silently throwing up his coffee.

*

The bastard.

It was bad enough, Elena thought, having to remember him before she opened her eyes, having to groan at the memory of the messages – four, five? – she’d sent before she’d finally come to her senses. Loving, then anxious, then angry, then desperate, then . . . drop it. Never send a message to ask if
the first message arrived, because it always has. He’s not answering because it’s over. How many times had she been through it? Move on.

Bad enough, without this. Beyond the window a large vehicle was making a lot of noise, again. There’d been comings and goings all night, it felt like. Yet another delivery to the splendid new development that was the Palazzo San Giorgio.

Elena Giovese wasn’t the only one who objected. Residents up and down the steep street, even those with charmed family lives and stable careers, had put in official complaints about deliveries at all hours of the day and night. What might it be this time? She could hear the cranking of some kind of hydraulic lift: it would be a bath carved from a single piece of crystal, perhaps, or a gold-plated statue, or four tonnes of polished Carrara marble.

She opened her eyes and saw his CDs by the door and groaned, audibly.

The persistent complainers, Elena was sure, the ones who threatened legal action and letters to the
comune
, had got paid off. She hadn’t been down that route herself. She wanted a quiet life, in all senses of the word. She wanted to get up at nine, go downstairs and unlock the workshop; she wanted to make a cup of coffee for her uncle when he turned up and she wanted to settle down peacefully to a specific task. Sanding a piece of two-hundred-year-old wood, regilding a cornice, scraping off damaged paintwork.