Christobel Kent - A fine and private place

She leaned down and struck the table. ‘With Joe. For giving in, after all this time, because of some shitty little position here. I told him, I won’t go without you. Told him, jeez, we can go and have fun in Italy if that’s what we want, we don’t need those guys.’ And then her voice cracked, and was gone. ‘But he went and did it, didn’t he? He went and did it, and I found him on the bathroom floor.’

Luca Gallo was still trying to say something, but Sandro was struggling with the sensation of dizziness her words induced in him, the unmistakable sound of truth in the claustrophobic room.

‘But what about the telefonino? ’ he said, in despair, grappling even for that word, his English suddenly exhausted. ‘His mobile. His cell phone.’

And Michelle took a step towards him, the thin light behind her.

‘The telefonino? ’ she said, and she swung her arm out to include Luca Gallo at last, something like jubilation in the gesture. She laughed bitterly. ‘I don’t have the telefonino . Tell the man, Luca.’ Then, gazing straight at Sandro now, she went on. ‘All right, I will. “Has anyone seen Count Orfeo’s cellphone?” Luca asked us, just the next day. If we found it, we were to give it to him, so that’s what we did. Not straight away, maybe, but he’s had it since that Wednesday, the day before she died.’

And then, finally, they both turned to look at Luca Gallo.

Her face pressed to the window of Tiziano’s ground-floor apartment, with its hoist and specially adapted bathroom facilities, Cate called his name, then again, then banged on the glass through the security bars. And as she began to lose her breath through panic and fright, Cate thought about the fact that Tiziano never let anyone in there: he came to the door to take his lunches, or they left them on the step. A private person.

A funny noise, Nicki had said. What funny noise? Was he in pain? Was he in trouble? Cate thought about the expression on his face the night before, when he’d swung her into his lap in Michelle’s apartment. Had he had anything to do with Loni Meadows’s death? Had he done something — stupid?

Cate found she couldn’t think about Michelle; she couldn’t get her head around it. The abrupt realization that it actually hadn’t been an accident; those theories Sandro Cellini had been constructing with careful determination suddenly standing up on their own: it was surreal, but it was true. That ice should not have been there; Loni Meadows had been called out to a lovers’ meeting that did not exist.

‘Tiziano,’ she whispered, trying to keep panic from her voice, ‘ Caro , what are you doing in there?’ Swallowed. ‘Are you all right?’

And then the door opened. He sat there. Not blocking the door as he usually did, beaming but implacable, hands out for his packed lunch, but staying back with his face in the door’s shadow, allowing Cate entry. She came inside, and the door closed behind her.

It was dark, even darker than it had been in the kitchen. ‘Do you have any candles?’ she asked. Not waiting for an answer, she crossed the square dim space like a blind person, bumping then skirting the great veneered bulk of the grand piano that was the sister to the one in the library and which dominated this smaller room. She knew where the candles would be as she was in charge of replenishing their stock for this eventuality: in a drawer in the room’s kitchen corner. She lit one and set it in a saucer: it didn’t give much light, but it was better than nothing. Tiziano shrugged, turning his face towards her and as her eyes adjusted she saw the change in him.

‘Nicki and Ginevra were worried about you,’ she said. ‘You didn’t answer.’

‘I’d forgotten what it was like,’ he said, his voice rough. ‘That’s all. I’d forgotten what leaving was like. Saying goodbye. And we should have had another four weeks together.’

Could that be all? That he would miss them, this strange family of misfits and loners? It couldn’t be all. Cate came back to his wheelchair and squatted beside him on her haunches. She could feel her feet still wet from the snow, her body feverish with tiredness and cold and wondered how long it would be before life returned to normal. If ever.

What if it wasn’t Michelle? What if she’d given that phone to someone else? She and Tiziano had always been close.

‘Tiziano,’ she said, and she couldn’t keep the fear out of her voice. ‘Darling.’ Cate used the endearment as her mother might have used it to her, as she might have used it to the brother she had never had. ‘He told me. Cellini told me, about your accident. About the bomb that killed your father. About Loni’s husband the lawyer, who defended the bomber.’

‘Did he?’ said Tiziano, and his voice came from somewhere buried deep.

‘Why were you — upset?’ She didn’t want to say, crying. ‘Just for leaving this bunch behind?’

‘Does he think I did it?’ asked Tiziano, not answering her question. ‘Does Cellini think I fixed her car, or drugged her, or — or — parked my wheelchair on the bend in the middle of the night to scare her off the road?’

Cate found she couldn’t speak.

Eventually she found some words. ‘I told him no way,’ she said.

‘You don’t think I could do it?’ And Tiziano took her hand quickly and raised it to his mouth and held it tight against his face; against her skin she felt the softness of his mouth and the prick of his stubble and the strength of his hands.

‘Physically?’ she said, and felt something like adrenaline surge through her, as it might have surged through him. ‘I think you could do it. Yes.’ Then bravely, ‘Do you know how to get there, across the fields?’

And he made a sound, in his throat, like a growl of pain. ‘Let me tell you,’ he said, ‘I could have done it. There’s nothing I can’t do, in or out of this chair.’ And abruptly he let go of Cate’s hand. ‘Nothing,’ he repeated, though they both knew that wasn’t true.

‘Do you know,’ he said in a voice so close to normal it was bizarre, ‘that bomber killed at least three other people because of her husband? Her husband the human rights lawyer: where were their human rights, those dead people? Where were mine? One of them a woman just married and four months’ pregnant.’

With awful inappropriateness, Cate wondered if Tiziano wanted children. And for the first time in what seemed like days Vincenzo came into her mind, V’cenz who’d said cheerfully when she’d turned in the street one time to look into a buggy, ‘You don’t want kids, do you, Cate? No way.’

‘I remember that,’ she said, and she did. A bomb in a station in Mestre.

‘You think I’d kill anyone? Leave anyone crippled, like me? D’you think I’d want that revenge?’

And Cate didn’t know what to say because that was exactly what they had contemplated silently, her and Sandro Cellini. The rich dullsheen of the piano gleamed in the thin light from the window; on the side the candle flickered. The room was bare, apart from the great instrument and a narrow bed. A monk’s cell; but he’d cried at the thought of leaving.

‘Revenge on a woman simply for being married to that old crook? Kill her to get at him? Who thought that? Did you? Did Cellini?’ His voice was ragged with emotion.

‘He doesn’t know you,’ said Cate. ‘It’s not his fault. And besides — he doesn’t think it was you, not any more.’

‘I could have done it,’ said Tiziano, sitting up straight in the chair beside her, taller than her as she crouched beside him, her hand now on his thin, hard knee, though of course he couldn’t feel it. ‘I could have done it, but I didn’t. She didn’t even figure, with me.’