Christobel Kent - A fine and private place

‘See,’ she said. ‘Gotcha. Her sim card in my phone. Her phone records, her messages, right here.’

‘And here,’ said Sandro, weighing the envelope in his hand, strangely reluctant to open it. ‘So why didn’t you give it back to him, Luca?’ he asked, all of a sudden not feeling remotely triumphant. ‘He asked you about it, last night.’

‘He did, yes, he did,’ said Luca eagerly. ‘I told him it had been found. He was going to come and get it this morning.’ His face fell. ‘Only he left very early.’

Sandro ripped the envelope and pulled the phone out. Thumb hard down on the on button. Nothing happened.

‘No battery, I suppose,’ said Luca nervously. Sandro grunted, staring down at it, thinking. Pressed the button again, threw the thing down on the desk where it landed in a slew of museum brochures. Michelle came closer to him.

‘Here,’ she said quietly. ‘Look at this.’

Messages. Last message received, from someone Loni Meadows’s address book recognized as Nic.

Seem to find myself free this evening , it read, in English. Perhaps whoever sent the message thought that made it more aristocratic. At the Liberty. You know I don’t like to be kept waiting.

‘You were right,’ said Michelle, wonderingly.

Slowly Sandro took the phone from her. Clicked back to get to the call history. The last number she called.

Nic, 00.09 22 February. Call out, at nine minutes past midnight on the Friday morning.

‘She called,’ said Sandro. ‘She was down there in the dark, concussed, frightened, certainly in shock, probably hypothermic.’ They were both staring at him now. ‘She called her lover,’ he went on. ‘Of course. She thought he’d come to help her.’ Turned to Luca Gallo. ‘More fool her.’

Gallo was staring, shaking his head, but Sandro wouldn’t wait.

‘Did you even answer? Did you listen to her sobbing, or was she incoherent?’ He stared into Gallo’s face, refused to let him look away.‘You weren’t even content to leave her to die, were you? You had to go down there to make sure. And then you went through her pockets to find her phone and throw it in the river.’

Sandro looked at the shambles of the office and wondered that this man could have the presence of mind to do that. He must have hated her.

‘Did she threaten you, did she write about you on her blog? Did she write to the American office, perhaps? Did she make allegations? Was it you, sabotaged her computer, thinking you might destroy evidence?’

There was a silence, and in the dim, stuffy room Sandro felt something, almost as palpable as a change in temperature, coming from Michelle Connor at his shoulder.

‘Luca?’ she said, with horror. ‘No.’

‘Did you get Mauro to lay down the ice for you?’ Sandro went on. ‘He’d have done it, wouldn’t he, no questions asked? And then later. You came up here, you left the dinner table. You said you were coming up here — but no one saw you, did they? You might have been — anywhere.’

And Gallo said softly, ‘No.’

‘No?’ Damn it, thought Sandro, damn it. Just admit it.

‘I was on the phone to my lover Salvatore, in Sicily,’ said Gallo simply, and all his anxiety, all his fear was gone. ‘He’ll tell you. The phone records will tell you. We talked until very late.’ He shrugged. ‘I don’t know when exactly. It doesn’t matter. He’ll tell you.’

On the desk between them Niccolò Orfeo’s discarded mobile glowed into life.

NO SIM, it read.

Sandro frowned at it. ‘What does that mean?’ he said impatiently. His own phone might be invaluable to him but he regularly found himself infuriated by its intricacies, its gnomic utterances.

‘It means the sim card isn’t in there,’ said Michelle slowly. She sounded sick.

‘But it was in there when you found it. And when you handed it over — ’

‘I didn’t — it wasn’t — ’and Michelle froze.

‘Hold on — ’ said Sandro because something occurred to him, something that should have sounded an alarm an hour earlier. ‘You said,’ and he spoke carefully, ‘didn’t you say, we laughed? You said, we thought, what an old fool. What a whore . We.’

He looked from Gallo to Michelle. ‘It wasn’t Michelle gave you the phone, was it?’ he said to Gallo. And to Michelle, ‘Who were you looking at those messages with? Who did you trust to give it back to Luca?’

But he already knew.

‘Is it really snowing down there?’ said Luisa distractedly, the phone in her hand as she paced the floor. ‘And it’s possible there’s no signal, either.’ She pressed her face against the glass as though a glimpse of the Carmine church might come to her rescue. ‘What if he’s had some kind of accident?’

‘It’s pretty remote,’ said Giuli, hardly listening. She was scrolling through a post on Loni Meadows’s blog from six months previously, covering an exhibition in New York. It was slow work, trying to understand the English. The text wasn’t so much about the art, which was just as well, as when she clicked on the small photographs of the exhibits inset in the text Giuli found them at best incomprehensible, at worst downright disturbing. It seemed to be more of an attack on the artist.

‘Come here,’ she said to Luisa. ‘Your English is better than mine.’ Luisa crossed the room in two strides, impatient as always, and sat beside Giuli on the seat. ‘Shift,’ she said, peering at the screen, and Giuli got another chair.

‘Cheap exhibitionism,’ Luisa translated roughly. ‘No canvas but her own abusive childhood. This is not art, it is indecent exposure. Trailer-trash — ’she didn’t know what that meant ’ — picking the lint out of her navel and sticking it on a pot.’ She peered at the picture, clicking to enlarge it, the slender-necked, elegant shape of an Etruscan amphora. Close up a small, ugly creature had been fashioned on the vase’s smooth bell, a thing horned and toothed andclotted with clumps of hair and nail, possessed of a horrible energy. Luisa recoiled.

‘Abusive childhood?’ said Giuli. Luisa’s eyes refocused, looking into hers. ‘Yes,’ she said, and reached across the desk for the piece of paper she had plucked from the array they had set out earlier.

‘I said, didn’t I?’ she murmured, looking from the page to the screen. ‘I said, if I had to pick any of them out of a line-up as — what? Mentally unstable? I’d have picked her. And Sandro said, Look for the weak, not the strong . That’s her.’

And Luisa took up her mobile. ‘I’m going to call him,’ she said. ‘He has to know about this. Because if I was this girl, this abused girl grown up to make monsters of her own life, and if I read this — if I thought millions of people were going to read this about me — ’ And she broke off to dial, her head shaking, back and forth.

‘Her, then,’ said Giuli. ‘Tina Kreutz.’

And Cate ran, around the back of the castle, past the kitchen, past the stairs to Luca’s office, the door to her own apartment. She couldn’t even have said why she was running or how she knew that she must be quick: she couldn’t have said if she was running towards something or away from it. The snow clung to her soaked trouser legs and clogged on her boots, her feet as heavy and numb as lead. She passed the laundry and slid, landing heavily on her side, something hard and sharp catching her on the hip bone. She blinked with the pain, but it occupied only a part of her brain, she scrabbled and was upright and looking into the wide glass frontage of Michelle’s bungalow.

There was the detritus of the night before, or some of it; there was a black plastic rubbish sack open to reveal crumpled cans and newspaper. As her eyes adjusted she noticed two suitcases, tagged, neatly upright and side by side, and scanning the room she saw that half the shelves had been emptied. It looked abandoned, a place where vagrants might have slept and from which they had moved on. But even as she strained to see behind the glass Cate knew, this wasn’t it. This wasn’t the place, this wasn’t what she’d come to find.