The Killing Room (8 page)

Sandro stood up, put on his jacket. ‘All right,’ he said, thinking of his freedom. Luisa would be mad as hell but he could be out of here. ‘So those nasty little mishaps were just a series of accidents. Vito’s death . . . well, I’m sure the Carabinieri will solve that in five minutes. Accidental overdose would be my guess; not too much blowback – if you’re lucky. Sure, you still need a house detective but maybe you could train the doorman up? And keep your fingers crossed.’

It was a long time since Sandro had taken a stand; it coursed in his veins like euphoria. He turned to the door.

‘No,’ she said, very quietly behind him, and he turned back, grimly. ‘You’re right,’ she said. ‘I’ll deal with Gastone. But please—’ And Alessandra Cornell stopped, her knuckles white as she gripped the back of the chair, so used to keeping control she didn’t know how to surrender it.

‘You’ll have to trust me,’ he said wearily. ‘You have no option.’

An intercom buzzed on the desk. Rigid, she stared at it as if it might bite her, and Sandro leaned down and picked up the handset. ‘Miss Cornell’s office,’ he said. It was Lino the doorman, affronted at hearing Sandro’s voice. They were here.

‘Would you tell the officer Miss Cornell will be free very shortly?’ he said, and heard Lino’s intake of breath. ‘Send him along in five minutes.’

He took the contract from the desk. ‘I’ll need to show that to my wife before I sign anything,’ he said. ‘So. We haven’t got long.’

As he left, the
carabiniere
in the familiar dark uniform was walking towards Sandro down the corridor, young and upright but pale under the southern tan. On impulse Sandro turned on to the stairs, just so as not to have to hold the man’s gaze. The young
carabiniere
passed behind him – and something followed him, tainting the air.

There was a smell to it. Death.

*

Giuli knew where to find Maria. You could tell the time by the old bird: at the Centre cleaning until three-thirty, home to prepare her husband’s dinner, out for a brandy in the Dolce Vita in the Piazza del Carmine before he got back. Five sharp, like clockwork.

It was impossible to tell how old Maria actually was. Born in the hills up near Poppi, she had the lined, dark skin of a
contadina
and had probably lost her teeth by the time she was forty. She might have been married fifty years, thought Giuli, quailing at the thought.

A text came in from Sandro as Giuli was locking the office door behind her.
I need you onside tonight, six sharp Palazzo San Giorgio. I’ve cleared it.

The old Giuli would have said, you can stuff it. No thanks. I don’t need any of you. But Luisa and Sandro – and now Enzo too – had softened her up. Taught her that sometimes people
meant what they said, and that it took guts to ask for help. All the same, she didn’t go overboard replying.

Okay
. And headed out.

When she saw Giuli, old Maria seemed to shrink down even smaller at the Formica bar, clutching her precious glass. She was watching the TV over the barman’s head, the
telegiornale
announcing some politician resigning, a tickertape commentary running along the bottom: Lotto announcements, a sex scandal and a fall in export figures. And then a girl in plunging sequins and plastic boobs introduced a gameshow. At random Giuli ordered fruit juice, one of the little bottles of apricot nectar Luisa always forced on her.

Maria had edged away, her little shoulders hunched, looking anywhere but at Giuli.

‘Does everyone know?’ Giuli said, eyeing the sickly liquid in her glass. Who was she kidding, feeding herself up for a wedding dress? But she swallowed it down like medicine all the same. ‘Do they know who it is, too? Telling lies about me.’

‘I don’t know. I don’t know what you mean,’ mumbled Maria, but Giuli saw her leathery cheeks redden. She’d pinned her thin hair back in a sparkly barrette, incongruous against the ancient raincoat, and Giuli felt a pang of guilt at the sight; this glass of brandy would be the cleaner’s only break in a day of slog.

‘I’m sorry,’ she said, patting the raincoated shoulder. She gestured to the barman to refill the old woman’s glass, put down a note and headed out. But she hadn’t got as far as the door when she sensed something pulling at her, a small snuffling presence at her elbow, and there was Maria, glass in hand, pointing at the back room.

‘Does everyone think it’s true?’ Giuli said when they were seated. The room had no windows; the only other occupant was an old man muttering over a dog-eared paper in the corner. A smell of unwashed layers rose off him.

Maria curled her fingers round the glass. ‘Not everyone,’ she said. ‘Maybe half and half.’ And she looked at Giuli, nervous of having said the wrong thing.

Fifty per cent. ‘And which half are you?’ Giuli said.

The toothless old mouth collapsed in on itself, mumbling. Then she spoke up. ‘You’re a good girl, Giulietta,’ she said, and gingerly she sipped at her brandy. ‘No children, me, what do I know? But you’re always on time, never bugger off early like some, and you don’t complain. About what life’s dealt out to you.’ It amounted to a speech, by the old lady’s standards.

‘Has Farmiga been back?’ Last year a case of Sandro’s had got a doctor sacked for her ties to a right-wing group; if Giuli had to pinpoint her most definite enemy, it would be Nicoletta Farmiga. She had no idea where she’d gone.

But Maria shook her head. ‘Haven’t seen hide nor hair. She wouldn’t have the nerve, anyway.’

Giuli wouldn’t put anything past Farmiga. ‘So who?’

The old man’s head was lifted, scenting something across the room, and Maria looked around anxiously. ‘I dunno, honest,’ she said.

‘You know something, though,’ said Giuli, patient.

The old woman took a quick swig, then she spoke hurriedly. ‘The Director did have someone in with her yesterday. A patient. I’ve seen her once or twice, but usually . . . well. Usually she doesn’t see the Director, let’s say. She’s in—’ And she jerked
her head as if they were back in the Centre and she was pointing down a corridor. ‘Down there. Comes in for the methadone.’

Addictions, then. Massini had let that slip.

Maria went on. ‘You can’t say I told. I’ll be out too if they know, won’t I?’

‘It’s all right,’ said Giuli. ‘Has someone told you not to talk to me?’

Maria looked down into her drink. ‘They might clear you anyway, mightn’t they? Why would they believe her over you?’ Giuli said nothing, and the cleaner took another sip. ‘Anyway, it was after that the rumours started going round. About you. Yesterday afternoon.’

Her day off: probably no coincidence. If you want to stick the knife in, wait until your victim’s back is turned. Massini would have made a big fuss about confidentiality but she had a secretary, didn’t she? People liked to talk. And only the week before they’d all been clustering around her cooing at her engagement ring. Gold with diamond chips: all Enzo could afford, but nobody said how small the stones were. In the stuffy back room, aware that there were questions Maria wasn’t answering, conscious of the crazy old man peering over his paper, Giuli struggled with paranoia.

She took a deep breath. ‘You know her name? The methadone junkie.’

The old woman shook her head. ‘They’re always trying to get her children off her. The
comune
are. And she knows you – so maybe you know her.’

Giuli felt her forehead prickle with sweat as the name came to her. ‘Rosina.’

The woman she’d seen in reception that very morning, eyes sliding away as Giuli looked, with her skin blotched from drugs and her skinny limbs. The woman Giuli would have turned into if she’d stayed on the streets. Reluctantly Maria nodded.

‘She still living out in Galluzzo then?’ Giuli said softly, very softly, as the old man’s filmy eyes swept the room. ‘A
casa popolare
, wasn’t it, last I heard?

Hunched over her glass, Maria stared, saying nothing, and Giuli had the sense of the woman’s used-up body being a cage of bones, inside her chest a tired old muscle that didn’t know when to give up.

‘I think she was evicted last time they found drugs,’ she whispered at last. ‘She’s probably back with the mother. For as long as it lasts.’

They both knew what that meant. ‘She takes them to school every morning,’ Maria said. ‘To show them she can be a mother. The big
elementare
in the Via della Chiesa.’

Giuli nodded. Maria’s worn old hand crept across the table to rest on hers.

‘You be careful, Giulietta,’ she said. No one called her Giulietta any more.

‘What have I got to lose?’ she said.

As she came out on to the street she heard a
motorino
’s engine start up somewhere behind her, but she didn’t turn around.

*

They’d been gossiping up in menswear all afternoon, Giuseppina and Beppe. Luisa had only gone up to challenge them after the
woman had been in with her husband – the woman from the Palazzo who already did bad things to Luisa’s blood pressure. Dislike was like poison in the bloodstream: you could try to neutralise it, but sometimes people were just too hateable. Magda Scardino.

He had sat oddly stiff in an armchair, reading something, while Luisa brought cocktail dresses, which Magda Scardino wanted tight, to the cubicle, and she talked through the curtain at him as though Luisa wasn’t there.

‘I expect you’re delighted, are you?’ she said, invisible. ‘You never liked him.’

The man hardly raised his head from his sheaf of papers, but when his wife emerged from the changing room, barely contained by a red dress, he cleared his throat. ‘I don’t know about that, my sweet,’ he said. ‘I do what I’m told, you know that. I know you like to introduce an element of competition into these things. I certainly wouldn’t have wished a violent death on him.’

Luisa turned the words over in her head, feeling a stir of unease. Who were they talking about?

Professor Scardino spoke mildly, as if he was only talking about what to have for lunch. Perhaps she’d heard wrong. And as he spoke he was eyeing his wife’s body in the swathed silk, not with love, exactly. With a clinical sort of look, Luisa thought. And as she wondered what it must be like to be married to a scientist, his words sank in.
Competition.
Then she blinked.
Violent death?

Over their heads, Beppe and Giusy had been talking about it too.

‘How did you hear about it, by the way, darling?’ the Professor said, head back down over his papers, as his wife looked at herself approvingly this way and that in the mirror. ‘Your ear to the ground?’

‘Oh, one of the servants,’ she said airily. ‘They were gossiping. Someone’s aunt knew his landlady, or something. You know how these people are.’

Magda Scardino’s eye flickered to Luisa in the mirror, then in a kind of challenge. Luisa stepped forward. ‘You might want it just nipped at the shoulder,’ she said, placing thumb and forefinger on the beautiful fabric from behind and pinching it into place.

Their eyes met a moment in the mirror before Magda Scardino said, already turning away, ‘I want something in gold.’

She chose three dresses, all to be taken in by that very evening – more, Luisa thought, for the pleasure of putting others to trouble than because they needed adjusting. The husband paid with one of those credit cards only available to the very wealthy, Giusy at the till looking nervously at Luisa over his shoulder.

She and Beppe hadn’t got Luisa in on it, Giusy said staring when the door closed behind the Scardinos, because they assumed she knew already. Of course.

‘Bottai called on Mr Frollini this afternoon, too. It must be connected,’ said Giusy, enjoying every minute. ‘Not good publicity for the place.’

Sandro had not thought to tell her, though. That the man he’d been hired to replace had been found dead by his landlady.

Luisa thought of bluffing it out with them, but in the end it was beneath her dignity. ‘It won’t have occurred to you,’ she
said drily, watching Giusy’s face, ‘that the reason they’ve hired Sandro is precisely because he’s not a blabbermouth. You think he’s the kind of man who calls his wife up every five minutes to give her the inside story?’ She watched Giusy pout like a smacked child and almost believed it herself.

There already seemed to be all sorts of theories: they’d come tumbling from Giusy’s over-excited mouth before she caught Luisa’s expression and pulled herself up. Auto-erotic asphyxiation, sex games gone wrong, drugs, a hit – the more lurid the better. Luisa was old enough not to believe any of it right off, because people loved to make up stories, and Giusy more than most. She didn’t need more than a hint to spin out a whole tabloid scandal.

‘They’re lucky they’ve got Sandro,’ she said stoutly.

‘Of course,’ said Beppe, coming down the stairs behind Giusy. But Luisa saw the glance they exchanged. ‘Why don’t you get off early, Luisa?’

Chapter Eight

S
ANDRO SAT ON ONE
of the white loungers on the lower terrace in the evening sun; he had eaten a handful of nuts from the bowl on the low table beside him, and his hand was greasy. He could see the backs of the houses below and as he watched an old woman moving slowly on her balcony, watering plants. He felt a pang of envy: she was on the outside. She leaned over a pale-blue trailing thing; Luisa would have known what it was called. Why did women know about plants? He was nervous. Focus, he thought. He could hear them now, voices on the upper terrace, and soon he would have to stand up and shake their hands and make polite conversation.

There were no napkins. Surreptitiously he wiped his palm on the side of one of the lounger cushions – it was that or his own trousers. He wondered where the maid had got to. Alice, she was called. He reached into his pocket and took out the piece of paper he’d found there half an hour earlier. Vito’s floorplan.

It had been a mistake, trying to explore – or snoop. Alice had caught him at it. Calculating that the Carabinieri would be in
with Alessandra Cornell for forty minutes at least, Sandro had slipped upstairs, and got lost.

He had never thought of himself as the claustrophobic type, but he had found himself pulling at his collar as he stepped out into a long corridor, wall to wall cream carpet stretching all the way to the end. He had sent Giuli a text telling her to come to the unveiling of the sculpture that evening, and now he felt like he might never find his way back out to meet her.