The Killing Room E-Book

Christobel Kent

• Herausgeber: Corvus
• Kategorie: Krimi
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2014

Beschreibung

When private investigator Sandro Cellini is invited to attend a glamorous launch party for a luxury residence overlooking Florence, he has no idea what he's walking into. Behind the austere beauty of Palazzo San Giorgio's façade terrible secrets lie hidden: not only an old torture chamber uncovered during excavations, but a much more recent malevolence. Then the head of security dies under suspicious circumstances and Sandro takes on the dead man's role. He soon discovers that his predecessor's death was not random, or isolated, when one of the residents is found murdered in her room. Now, Sandro must work to untangle the secrets of the palazzo to unmask a deadly killer before the fate of another victim is sealed...

Leseprobe

CHRISTOBEL KENT’S previous books include ADarkness Descending, The Dead Season, A Fine and Private Place, A Time of Mourning, A Party in San Niccolo, Late Season and A Florentine Revenge. She lives near Cambridge with her husband and five children.

Also by Christobel Kent

The Sandro Cellini Novels

A Darkness Descending

The Dead Season

A Fine and Private Place

A Time of Mourning

Published in trade paperback in Great Britain in 2014

by Corvus, an imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd.

Copyright © Christobel Kent, 2014

The moral right of Christobel Kent to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities, is entirely coincidental.

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Trade paperback ISBN: 978 0 85789 330 7

E-book ISBN: 978 0 85789 331 4

Printed in Great Britain.

Corvus

An imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd

Ormond House

26–27 Boswell Street

London WCIN 3JZ

www.corvus-books.co.uk

For Laura, with love

Contents

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-One

Chapter Twenty-Two

Chapter Twenty-Three

Chapter Twenty-Four

Chapter Twenty-Five

Chapter Twenty-Six

Chapter Twenty-Seven

Chapter Twenty-Eight

Chapter Twenty-Nine

Chapter Thirty

Chapter Thirty-One

Chapter Thirty-Two

Chapter Thirty-Three

Chapter Thirty-Four

Chapter Thirty-Five

Chapter Thirty-Six

Chapter Thirty-Seven

Epilogue

THE POWDERY RESIDUE DUSTED Nieddu’s hair white: it sat in his eyebrows and on his lashes, but even beneath it the stonemason was ghost-pale. He pushed his way out through the PVC sheets they’d hung to protect the rest of the Palazzo from the excavation’s fallout. The other man – no more than grunt labour, a Romanian on day rates – followed him anxiously until they reached the long doors that opened into the imposing building’s garden. Pulling roughly at his mask on the threshold, the mason gulped the damp, cool air as if he’d been underwater.

Below them three men were talking under umbrellas on the terrace, and beyond them the great city spread out in the drizzle. The boss in his tight-buttoned coat turned to look up at the workers and, seeing something, held up a hand to stay his interlocutors.

It was the boss and the architect out there in the rain; the third man was a prospective client. The boss had introduced the client to Nieddu, when they’d passed through the cellar excavations, as a man of science: a bit of showmanship that was really a warning to be on best behaviour. The hand the man had held out to him had trembled and stalled in mid-air, and the mason had felt something in the atmosphere then, a vibration. Afterwards it seemed to him the client’s reluctance foreshadowed what was to come.

Nieddu had not long worked out there was something back there: the little rivulet of crumbling plaster at the first probing was the telltale sign of a long-gone rush job. It hadn’t been the time to mention it. They’d waited until the men were out of earshot before starting in with the Kango and the big sledge-hammer. It had taken no more than fifteen minutes to get through, then another five for the dust to settle.

A man of science. The stonemason was a practical type himself but even he knew science didn’t explain everything. It didn’t explain what they had found.

‘There’s a whole other room down there,’ he said to the Romanian, his breathing still irregular. ‘It must have been bricked up.’

‘Bricked up?’ The labourer repeated the words in his thick accent, still struggling to understand Nieddu’s pallor, the haste with which he’d backed out of the excavation site. The two men hardly knew each other, but the air between them had turned nasty. Something had seeped out from the place they had disturbed.

‘Years ago. Decades. Maybe centuries, I don’t know.’ Nieddu shook his head and the dust shifted. There were spots of colour now in his cheeks, streaked with dirt. ‘The boss needs to know about it.’

Bottai was walking up towards them. The architect stared after him uncertainly: he would do what he was told, anyway. The smile the stonemason had seen fixed on the boss’s face from day one, for the benefit of the prospective clients, had been replaced with a look of grim determination.

‘I don’t like it,’ said Nieddu, to himself. ‘It’s more than bad luck.’

Chapter One

THE SUIT HUNG ON the heavy-fronted wardrobe, souring the evening before it had begun. It had been put there by Luisa who, by the time Sandro saw it, was in the bathroom applying her make-up.

‘Just put it on,’ she said, without looking round.

Standing next to her now, at sunset on the steep cant of the Costa San Giorgio, Sandro surreptitiously worked a thumb into his waistband. The woman ahead of them in the line to get in – a Marchesa di Something or Other, Luisa whispered – had already given him a look of disdain.

‘You could get it let out,’ Luisa had said dubiously in the bedroom, walking round him, tugging here and there. Loosening something off. The suit had been made by a tailor in Prato more than twenty years earlier and Sandro had remembered the man saying through the pins in his mouth, It’ll see you out. Room for another five kilos.

Which, to the tailor – a wiry little smoker of cheroots, an unmarried man who sat under fluorescent light at his cutting table in a grimy Prato backstreet until late into the night – must have represented a wild over-estimate of what a man of stature could expect to gain in his middle years.

He couldn’t remember why he’d had it made. It seemed a ridiculous extravagance from this end of a life, though much had been made at the time of the bargain he was getting. A wedding? A funeral was more likely, even then, even when he’d been little more than forty. In their prime, policemen attended funerals like most people went to christenings.

‘Why are we even going?’ he’d said grumpily, gingerly pulling the sides of the jacket together. ‘Why were we even invited.’ It was more a lament than a question.

‘She’s an important customer.’

‘Who is?’

‘She’s called Alessandra Cornell.’

And now Alessandra Cornell was standing just inside the carriage entrance to a palazzo on the steep southern bank of the Arno, a slender blonde in a nicely cut cocktail dress Sandro assumed Luisa had sold her. A barrel-chested man Sandro distantly recognised stood beside her, leaning down to clasp the hand of the Marchesa.

Alessandra Cornell had a name badge. ‘Welcome to the Palazzo San Giorgio,’ she said, fixing him with her attention. She spoke in English to him too, as though by passing through the flawlessly restored doorway of the palace they had left Italy behind them.

‘She’s . . . what is she?’ Luisa had said from behind his back in their bedroom, uncharacteristically vague. ‘She spends plenty in the shop. I think her card says “attaché”, or something. She’s basically going to be running the place.’

‘The place’ being the newly consecrated Palazzo San Giorgio, a luxury residence overlooking the glittering expanse of Florence from the privileged slopes of the Oltrarno. Sandro had looked at the brochure Luisa had brought home a week or so back. A new concept in leisure, a revolution in lifestyle choices. He had no idea what that meant. As far as he knew, it was serviced apartments. And attaché? For the love of God.

Four storeys high and five vast windows across, the wide, handsome frontage of the palace was visible from Fiesole, on a clear day. For decades it had stood decaying and unrestored while its multiple owners haggled with sitting tenants, bickered with their children and their cousins and their wives over whether it should be sold and for how much, and then over how the spoils should be divided.

‘Ah,’ said Alessandra Cornell, holding on to Sandro’s hand a fraction longer than he would have liked and looking, not at Luisa, which would, given their connection, have been both the polite and the natural thing to do, but at Sandro, and too intently at that. ‘So this is the famous Sandro.’

Sandro flinched, but did not turn accusingly, as he would have liked to have done, on Luisa.

‘Am I?’ he said weakly.

Cornell frowned a little and turned to the man at her side. ‘This is our Director,’ she said. ‘I’m sure you already know of him. Gastone Bottai.’

Looking over Sandro’s shoulder, the man offered him a limp hand. No warm clasping for Sandro.

‘Yes,’ said Sandro. ‘Of course.’

A pampered son, a PR man. Bottai’s gaze rested on him, supremely indifferent. They might have been introduced half a dozen times, but it wouldn’t be worth his while remembering a policeman. Ex-policeman. He supposed the title Director must mean Bottai was the boss. In which case, God help them.

And abruptly he found himself moved on, past Bottai and Cornell and into the high vaulted space of the entrance where a waiter stood, already glazed with boredom, holding out a tray. ‘Luisa,’ he heard Cornell say behind him, airily familiar, ‘I’ll catch up with you later. Enjoy.’

Enjoy. Sandro reached for a glass of champagne. It was going to be one of those evenings. He remembered that thought, later.

‘Behave yourself,’ said Luisa, into his ear. They followed the couple in front of them around a corner and found themselves in the garden.

There were candles everywhere, gleaming in the clipped hedges, in deep glass jars standing on the low walls, flickering on small tables. Sandro didn’t understand candles outside a church – secular, domestic candles, scented candles, candles in the bathroom, nightlights in special holders. The young woman in the building opposite them in Santa Croce burned tealights every evening, a little votive row along her windowsill.

Below them on the garden terraces people moved in the flickering light, the night filled with murmuring voices. A good turn-out: between them Cornell and Bottai must have used the big guns. Why Sandro had been invited remained an uneasy mystery to him.

A tall, fair man with a high forehead stood immediately in front of them, talking to a younger, stockier one with a chiselled jaw. Just to the side, a very handsome woman with auburn hair and a lot of gold at her neck was looking bored. The younger man appeared to be listening earnestly: the tall one was stooping slightly and talking, as far as Sandro could tell, about seaweed. ‘The figures are what are interesting,’ he was saying. ‘Costs barely anything to generate. Of course there are environmental concerns—’

‘Darling,’ said the handsome woman, interrupting, her eyes sliding over the young man, pausing, moving on. Sandro made a guess at her age: forties. Strong. After fifty that tends to go. ‘I’m sure I can see the Flemings.’ Now she was looking at Luisa, pondering.

Luisa nodded just barely. The woman nodded back and turned away.

‘Who was that?’ said Sandro, his interest piqued despite himself.

‘Customer. One of their . . . residents. Scardino. He’s English, but Italian some way back, a professor of something. She’s the wife. Polish.’ Luisa wore an expression he knew of old: concentrated dignity, which she assumed when confronted with bad-mannered foreigners. Out of the corner of his eye he saw the back of the woman’s neck, the glint of gold, the shining hair. He heard her laugh, low. Luisa smiled just faintly. ‘Third wife.’

‘And not the last?’

Her smile warmed, rewarding him. I love my wife, he thought.

‘You should mix,’ she said, giving him a little push at the elbow. ‘It’s what we’re here for.’

Sandro stood his ground, and she looked at him. ‘Don’t you understand,’ she said, ‘this is what you have to do. It’s called networking.’ She lowered her voice. ‘Cornell’s got clout. She might not know it yet, but she needs someone like you.’ And then she was waving. ‘Signora Artusi,’ she called, and she turned her back on him, the woman she’d hailed already swivelling round to size her up with narrowed eyes. ‘Marina!’

It was all right for Luisa, she knew what these occasions were for, she just got down to work. He’d been cut loose.

*

Marina Artusi was a prize bitch – mostly on the subject of her only son and his foreign fiancée – but unlike most of the Florentine nobility at least she was entertaining. She didn’t waste any time on the usual insincere praise, and within five minutes Luisa had heard her scathing opinion of her future daughter-in-law’s fashion sense, fat English legs and performance in bed. ‘I can hear them at it!’ Marina said, outraged. ‘She spends all the time bossing him about.’

Guiltily Luisa tried and failed not to be amused, looking around to make sure that Sandro was not in earshot. This kind of conversation would have him squirming in shame.

To her mixed feelings he seemed to have disappeared. When she turned back, Marina Artusi was practically on tiptoe as she strained to get sight of something. Catching Luisa’s surprise, she drew herself back down.

‘Looking for someone?’ said Luisa, and an expression she hardly recognised appeared on Marina’s face: a soft, flushed look. Luisa glanced from the glass in the woman’s hand – still full – across to the heads where her gaze had been directed.

‘Oh, someone I knew years ago,’ Artusi said, as if trying to catch her breath and affect composure at the same time. ‘You know we were in Damascus? Carlo and I. Oh, twenty-five years back at least.’

‘Yes?’ said Luisa, who had not known that. She was trying to find a face worthy of Marina’s besotted expression. All she could see was a sea of middle age, but then twenty-five years was a long time.

‘I heard he’d signed up for this place,’ said Marina. Then, carelessly, ‘With his wife, of course. I knew her too.’ Her aristocratic nose wrinkled.

Luisa looked up at the façade: they’d done a good job, no expense spared. For as long as she could remember, the palace had sat there crumbling away above the city, a blighted place. And – oddly, because Luisa wasn’t one prone to shivery intimations – she felt the creep of fine hairs rising at the nape of her neck, as though a draught had escaped from the building’s cellars and found its way to her.

‘There! There he is!’ Marina’s hand was on her arm, the other one pointing.

The man Luisa saw – stocky, square-shouldered, sixtyish – looked completely unexceptional to her. But he did have a full head of hair at least, even if it was grey, and she grudgingly admitted that most men looked good in a dinner suit. The James Bond effect. He leaned down a little to listen to something someone concealed from view on his other side was saying.

Marina Artusi let out a little sigh. ‘Martin,’ she said. ‘Martin Fleming. I believe he has one of those British honours now.’ She spoke lightly, but Luisa wasn’t fooled. Marina had obviously been stalking the man. ‘A cavaliere? Sir Martin. He was something at the British Embassy. I never found out what he actually did, but we went to an awful lot of cocktail parties there. That English restraint.’ Her eyelids quivered. ‘Carlo couldn’t stand him, of course.’

Of course. Marina’s husband Carlo had been a stranger to restraint: he had died of a heart attack in the arms of another woman ten years earlier. As they looked, a woman stepped out from behind Sir Martin, a small person with chopped-off grey hair and a sallow complexion – and Luisa saw that he was holding her hand. The snort of impatience that escaped Marina Artusi then was much more characteristic of her.

‘He got away then?’ said Luisa, before she could check herself.

Marina Artusi turned, a look of narrowed derision on her face. ‘They were childhood sweethearts,’ she pronounced, contemptuous. Then, with satisfaction tinged with shock, ‘My God, she’s aged.’

At that moment, almost as though despite the hubbub he might have heard the exchange, the man glanced in their direction. To Luisa’s dismay, Artusi immediately raised a hand. At her age, thought Luisa (meaning, our age). No, no.

But immediately the man – this Martin Fleming – smiled back. He even took a step towards them. Marina Artusi took several steps in his direction, tugging Luisa behind her, and they were brought up close.

‘Marina,’ he said. ‘After all this time.’ And, addressing his wife, ‘You remember Marina, darling?’

What struck Luisa first was that after twenty-five years he had remembered Marina’s name without hesitation. But then he turned to Luisa and, seeing his smile, his crinkled eyes close to and focused on her, she couldn’t help but smile back, and she abruptly understood exactly what Marina Artusi meant. Charm, or something. Luisa turned hastily away and found herself looking instead at Martin Fleming’s wife, the small greyhaired woman whose hand he still held. She seemed distinctly amused.

Beside Luisa, Marina Artusi cleared her throat in annoyance.

*

Out of sight of Luisa and feeling quite adrift, Sandro turned with a start when a hand fell on his shoulder. The young man with the big jaw who’d been listening to the Professor was now flashing a broad smile that did not quite distract Sandro from the bulge of trapezoid muscle pushing the line of his expensive suit out of shape at the shoulder.

‘Sandro Cellini?’ said the young man, the smile earnest and widening. ‘The Sandro Cellini?’

Sandro laughed with disbelief. ‘I don’t know about that,’ he said warily. ‘It’s my name.’

‘How modest,’ said the man – not much more than a boy, he seemed to Sandro, for all his muscle. There was an eagerness about him, like a well-trained schoolboy. ‘You tracked down that English girl, a couple of years back. And wasn’t there a fraud case? The murdered bank manager? Not to mention that political sabotage business.’ He held out his hand. ‘Giancarlo Vito.’

‘You’re well informed,’ said Sandro. ‘It’s not always so eventful.’ The days spent staring out of the window, or recording a young wife’s visits to the hairdresser, for her paranoid husband.

‘I know,’ said Vito, clasping his hands behind his back, standing to attention like a cadet. The stance made his shoulders look impossibly broad, and made Sandro feel like his grandfather. He straightened. ‘I’m in the same business,’ said Vito. ‘So it’s kind of a professional interest, you might say. Not that I’m my own boss, like you.’ He almost bowed. ‘I work for the Stella d’Argento.’

The investigations agency whose emblem was a sheriff’s badge, advertised on billboards out towards the airport and in all the professional circulars.

‘Mostly cybercrime, the bread and butter stuff,’ he went on apologetically. ‘I’m sat behind a computer. Not very exciting.’ Vito looked around with a young man’s hunger, the glitter of the evening reflected in his eyes.

Sandro opened his mouth to ask what he was doing there, then closed it again. One superannuated old-school detective with rounded shoulders, one handsome young cyber-expert standing to attention.

‘And you’ve got an elegant wife, so I hear,’ said Vito, turning back to Sandro politely. ‘You see, you’re ahead of me there, too.’

All this self-deprecation was beginning to niggle. What was he after? Sandro was aware of the charm, the open smile, throwing up a smokescreen, but it worked all the same. The boy got away with it.

‘Yes,’ said Sandro, looking around for her. ‘I’m a lucky man. Five years married by the time I was your age. At least.’ But turning back he caught the first sign on Giancarlo Vito’s face of something underneath the charm: a fleeting sly look of pleasure and calculation, of the anticipation of conquests.

On the terrace below them someone was tapping on a microphone, ascending a podium. A crowd was gathering. Without looking, Sandro knew that the speaker would be Bottai.

‘Better get down and show willing,’ said Vito, patting Sandro on the shoulder. ‘Catch you later, perhaps? I’d love to hear your stories.’ And he and his smile were gone, leaving behind them the whiff of doubt, and Sandro’s mood sinking like a pricked balloon.

His stories, indeed. What had that been about? Sandro shifted on his feet, the warm champagne glass in his hand. With the boy’s disappearance the evening felt like a net drawing tighter around him in the dark, all these wealthy people in their satin-lapelled dinner suits and their jewels nothing more than shiny fish. That draught from the cellars had been the start.

It came back to him that the builders had found something during the works on this place, a piece of gossip that had dissipated almost as soon as it appeared. Bones? Sandro doubted it. Human remains weren’t easily hushed up. Something archaeological, maybe. You couldn’t put a spade in the ground here without turning up a Roman brothel.

Turning away, Sandro saw a bar which had been set up under some bougainvillea beneath the illuminated façade, and headed straight for it. Feeling the champagne sour his stomach, he asked for a beer. A big dishevelled man, so ungroomed he might have been a gatecrasher, stood at the other end of the long zinc counter. He was talking to a young woman Sandro recognised as part of the well-bred rent-a-crowd. The man’s big paw came to rest on her slender knee; she looked down at it, debating her next move. Before she could make it, Sandro reached between them, setting his glass down on the bar. They looked at him, united in affront.

‘Sorry,’ said Sandro. The girl adopted the faintly bored expression she probably reserved for the bumbling elderly. Sandro turned to the big scruffy man. ‘Sandro Cellini,’ he said, holding out his hand. ‘I’m so sorry. I’m not used to these occasions. Formal occasions.’ He grimaced apologetically. At his shoulder the girl evaporated.

‘Thanks for that,’ said the man, offering neither his hand nor his name as he watched her go.

‘I’m so sorry,’ said Sandro, affecting innocence. ‘I’m sure she’ll be back.’

The bearded man grunted sourly. ‘There’ll be another one,’ he said, then groaned. ‘Christ, here they come,’ he muttered, and, sliding heavily off his stool, gestured to the barman, who handed him a beer without a word.

He must belong here, then. Sandro looked to see who had ousted him. A middle-aged couple, certainly foreign, were making their way up the steep path that led up the side of the garden from the lower levels. The man, climbing doggedly in the candlelight, was wiry, with the lined skin of an Anglo-Saxon who has spent too much of his life in the sun. The woman was pale and unmade-up: she had a country look about her, standing there awkwardly brushing at her silk dress as if she’d just taken off an apron. Sandro turned to look back after the big man, glimpsed him lumbering down through the garden. Maybe it’s me, thought Sandro, with dour pleasure.

‘I’m damned if I’ll listen to that PR rubbish,’ the new arrival was saying tersely, oblivious to Sandro, though it seemed to him the wife, if wife she was, was trying to catch his eye. ‘He’s got my money, hasn’t he?’ The man was talking in English, with an accent. American? No, thought Sandro, Australian. Paid-up residents. ‘I’m not boring myself to tears into the bargain, I’ve listened to enough bullshit in my time. They’re not our sort.’ The woman murmured, distressed, but the husband just turned his back on her and called the barman impatiently.

These people were so wealthy: why were they so discontented? Only a young man like Vito would hanker after what they had.

Down below them on the terraces the booming voice had stopped. Sandro peered down. From the far side of the stage a camera flashed, and Sandro blinked. He hoped there wouldn’t be a picture of him in La Nazione tomorrow. He rubbed his eyes. He saw the usual faces, the Florentine nobles and freeloaders, and distinct from them the incomers, the foreigners. Prospective residents of the Palazzo San Giorgio. A big woman, very old but still imposing, with cropped fine white hair and a strong profile; and a handful of couples. Average age early sixties: on the cusp of retirement, he supposed, although he knew the wealthy often got there early.

Sandro watched as the Professor ducked his high forehead to dodge the trailing jasmine above him on the pergola and raised a hand. Had they opened the floor for questions already? Maybe the end was in sight.

‘What kind of get-out clauses are you offering, Gastone?’ The Professor spoke drily, familiarly. At his elbow his wife smiled a little, provocative. Her hair, Sandro thought, momentarily fascinated, was extraordinary, dark red-gold. There’d been something in the way she’d looked at that young man with the broad shoulders. Vito. She put a hand to her hair as if she knew Sandro was watching. A titter ran along the back

‘It’s all in the literature, Professor Scardino,’ Bottai said smoothly. ‘Why? Has your lovely wife already spent it all in the Via Tornabuoni?’ The titter faded, then resurfaced, and Sandro looked for the woman. Her head was thrown back, her mouth open in a full-throated laugh. Men were staring at her.

Behind Sandro at the bar the Australian wife’s sniffling became audible and he turned. Feeling the husband’s pale eyes settle on him, Sandro held out his hand. ‘Welcome to Florence,’ he said in English. ‘Sandro Cellini. I’m a . . . I’m here with my wife.’ As if that explained everything. He tilted his head, looking at the woman. ‘Are you . . . is everything all right?’ He felt the husband looking at him with flat hostility.

‘Marjorie Cameron,’ she said, holding out a limp hand. ‘From Melbourne. We’re here for a year. My husband – this is my husband, Ian – he’ll be retiring soon, and we thought it would be a nice base for me. He works all over the world, you see, an engineer. Something in my eye.’

The non-sequitur took Sandro aback until he realised she was explaining her pink-eyed look. ‘There’s a lot of pollen, too,’ he said and gratefully she began to talk about allergies. She’d been pretty once, he registered as she brightened.

‘I would never have chosen Italy,’ said the engineer, interrupting her. Looking at his tough, lined face, his gingery eyebrows, Sandro reflected reluctantly that the Anglo-Saxons often seemed rude to start with. You couldn’t condemn them straight off. ‘But the ladies like it.’

Sandro was about to consider that statement when a noise started up somewhere far down the garden, a shrill yelping overlaid with a woman’s cries of distress: a sound of panic and fear. It reverberated through the evening; heads turned, the tenor of the conversation changed. And then a man’s voice, raised and blustering. Sandro took advantage of the diversion to edge away from the Camerons and head downhill, following the sound.

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

IT HAD TAKENLUISA 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

THE 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.