Christobel Kent - A fine and private place

‘I tried to hold her up,’ she said with horror. ‘I couldn’t do it.’

‘I know,’ said Sandro.

The hand he took was black with something, her face was dirty and streaked as though she had been playing a game of Cowboys and Indians, her clothing when he pulled her up and put his arms around her to stop her shivering was so wet he felt it soak into his own. But he felt her strong heart beat through the layers of clothing, he felt the answering warmth of her shoulders under his, all telling him, this one’s alive, all right.

It was close to midnight when Sandro Cellini left. And as she watched the tail-lights of the little car dip behind the far hill from the position she had taken up at the head of the great cypress avenue, the grand, forbidding front elevation of the Castello Orfeo at her back, Caterina Giottone contemplated the strange truth that she would probably never see him again.

But as she turned away from the lonely vista, something miraculous happened. All across the Castello Orfeo, all at once, the electricity came back on, and this grim, isolated prison of a place was transformed. For a wonderful second, it resembled a funfair or even a great ocean liner sailing across the dark, snow-covered hills, its decks and ballrooms blazing with light.

‘Finally,’ a voice said brusquely at her elbow, appearing out of the dark and smelling of woodsmoke, sweat and cooking. ‘Perhaps we can get back to work now. Or are you leaving us too?’

Ginevra.

Not everyone was gone. Per and his wife had packed up and left first in the jaunty little red car, Per enveloping Cate in a brief, tobaccoscented bear-hug. Telling her to visit Oslo, as his wife fussed and protested around them, ferrying bags.

Cate didn’t know what Sandro Cellini and Luca Gallo between them had said to the policeman who eventually arrived out from Pozzo Basso at close to seven in the evening, but it seemed he was convinced by it. The coroner’s office had removed Tina’s body to the morgue, where a post-mortem would be carried out. Posturing and pompous, the policeman had said that he would need to talk to Alec Fairhead, when he was considered fit enough by the doctors in Pozzo, where the helicopter had taken him.

Conscious now, although almost certainly with his skull fractured, Fairhead had looked ten, fifteen years younger as they carried him gingerly on a stretcher up to the helicopter whose blades whirred on the front lawn. Washed clean; born again. He’d looked up at Cate, who had been holding his hand, and somehow managed to say, with an odd delight, ‘It’s like they say when you have a stroke, and you wake up speaking a foreign language. It’s like that.’ She had nodded, not knowing what on earth he meant, but believing him all the same.

He’d tried to say more: to say that before he put his arm around her and tried to kiss her to calm her down, Tina had been talking about all sorts of things he didn’t understand. Voodoo and burning and fetching water from the river: almost biblical, Fairhead had said, growing agitated and bewildered at the memory. Cate had hushed him. ‘Someone will talk to you about that later,’ she’d said. ‘Don’t think about it now.’ And she’d just smiled as calmly as she could and he had subsided back down on to the stretcher and allowed Cate to extract her hand from his.

‘Nicki’s going, you know,’ said Ginevra accusingly. ‘Going to live in Rome, she says; there’s a girl there she was at school with.’ And sighed. ‘Now she tells me, with Mauro in hospital and all hell breaking loose.’

‘Yeah, well,’ said Cate, hearing a grudging resignation in Ginevra’s voice. ‘It was time, you know.’

The lights were back on in the bungalow: Michelle wasn’t leaving yet after all. She wanted to talk to the police herself, she said. She wanted to make sure they knew everything. I’ve done this before , Cate heard her say to Luca earlier. This suicide shit, it’s not straightforward . She hadsounded tired, like a mother at the end of a hard day, hands in the sink and the floor still to wash. It’s OK , she said to Luca. I’m fine.

And she’d gone to Tiziano’s room, and they’d shut the door.

‘Actually,’ Cate said now to Ginevra, ‘I’m not going. Sorry about that.’

‘I don’t know what I can offer you, Cate,’ Luca had said as they watched Sandro Cellini pacing the front lawns once the helicopter had risen and gone. The detective had been on his mobile, an hour or more, the tracks of his boots criss-crossing the snow as he paced and talked. His wife, Nicki had said.

Luca had shrugged, tired but not unhappy, the burden of trying to love this terrible, draughty old place lifted from him. ‘I don’t know what Orfeo plans to do now.’

‘I’ll stick around until it’s sorted,’ Cate had said to him. ‘No problem.’

Ginevra made a sound that only the privileged few would interpret as approval, and stamped away in the snow under the light cast from the library windows.

Tiziano had not told anyone his plans.

All Michelle had said, when she came out of his darkened room at last, was, ‘He wants to see you.’ And then she’d grabbed Cate’s elbow, so hard it hurt, and pulled her down to listen. ‘But you be sure you know what you’re doing first,’ she said levelly in the dark, ‘because if you hurt him you’ll have me to answer to.’

And inside the castle, Tiziano began to play.

Commissario Grasso had not been even faintly apologetic, but then Sandro had not expected that he would be. ‘She was overcome with remorse?’ the policeman had said, his lip curling. ‘Ah, yes.’ Refusing to believe a word of it. ‘Well, let’s wait and see, shall we? Post-mortem tomorrow or the day after. We’ll expect your attendance at the coroner’s court, in due course.’

At which Sandro had simply nodded, giving up the fight. Why should he care what such a man thought of him?

Then he’d called Mascarello. Who had also refused to believe it. It was Fairhead, wasn’t it? he had kept saying. I knew it was him .

So. He’d had a very good idea all about the dirty little affair, and the abortion, but he hadn’t told Sandro. Wanted to keep his hands clean, and get Sandro to nail Fairhead for him. Playing with him; feeding him information, titbits.

‘I’m sorry,’ Sandro had said. ‘He’s admitted to the email. He didn’t kill her, though. Even apart from the alibi, and the fact that there’s evidence, there’s cast-iron evidence — well. Never mind that. He’s just not capable of it. Sometimes — ’ and he’d lowered his voice respectfully, ‘sometimes you just know, don’t you?’

And at the other end of the line only the wheeze of Mascarello’s fading breath had been audible. Only you don’t know, Sandro had thought with grim satisfaction. You can’t tell the innocent from the guilty, the right from the wrong. Not you.

Reluctantly, he had said goodbye to Caterina, to Luca Gallo: silently he’d wished them well, but for himself he wished never to return to such a desolate place. And as he drove home in the dark, wearily careful on the deserted seaside road, around Grosseto, north to Siena, bumping through the Chianti under the great snow-covered trees, Sandro heard music in his head.

It was an old tune, a song from the south to which in their youth he and Luisa had countless times watched elderly couples turn slowly in each other’s arms in one summer festival or another. And as they had looked at the expressions on the old faces rested on the other’s shoulder or pressed soft against the other’s cheek — absent, dreaming, resigned, content — each had secretly wondered what it would be like, in forty years’ time. Fifty.