“Come,” she said, then threw some coins on the table and left the sergeant struggling to keep up as she strode across the small bridge to the old mansion.
He answered the door looking a mess: hair dishevelled, eyes red. His breath stank of wine. His eyes refused to meet hers.
“What do you want?” Daniel Forster asked.
“To talk to you.”
“I’ve nothing new to say.”
“Perhaps not. Perhaps we have something new to say to you. May we come in?”
He nodded and, with obvious reluctance, opened the door. They walked upstairs into the living room, which overlooked the rio. The dining table was now littered with dirty plates. Two empty bottles of wine stood in the centre. He beckoned them to sit in the deep armchairs by the dead fire.
“You’re missing your housekeeper, Daniel,” she observed. “This place has the smell of a lonely man about it.”
He stared at the mess on the table. “True. I still…” He glanced around the room as if it were some kind of cruel illusion. “I still find it difficult to believe they won’t come back.”
She thought about going upstairs, looking to see if the twisted, matted sheets were still there in the large bedroom at the back. There was no need. Nothing had changed in the house since she’d last seen it. In all probability the bloodstains were still on the carpet in the bedroom.
“The funeral is at San Michele on Friday, I gather,” she said. “Only a few hours before your concert. You must compose yourself for that. The living should allow grief to consume them only so much. If it oversteps itself, it offends the dead. Or their memory, at least.”
“I thank you for your condolences,” he replied flatly. “I’ll bear them in mind.”
“Good.” She found herself liking Daniel Forster in spite of his coldness towards her. “Tell me: Who do you think killed your friends?”
His head cocked to one side as if he were suddenly lost in thought.
“I thought you told me the answer to that. Laura. You seemed to think it was an open-and-shut case.”
“No!” she laughed. “I merely reported to you what the housekeeper herself said to us. She told you as much herself when you visited on Giudecca.”
He cast her a filthy look.
“You don’t think those guards are deaf, Daniel?” she asked. “They have ears. They can talk.”
“To hell with you.”
Biagio — who had, it appeared to her, been intent on keeping out of this conversation as much as possible — wagged an admonitory finger at Daniel Forster.
“Language,” he scolded. “In front of a lady.”
She raised an eyebrow at the curiously prudish sergeant. “Thank you, Biagio. I believe I can handle this. For what it’s worth, Daniel, I don’t blame you for feeling aggrieved. You seem to be surrounded by people who have let you down. Who have deceived you.”
He looked out of the window. It was going to be another hot, airless day. Perhaps, as a foreigner, he felt the temperature more than the locals.
“Is this going to take long? I was thinking of going out soon.”
“Not so long,” she replied. “It depends on you. I ask you again. Who killed your friends?”
His head moved slowly from side to side, as much in despair as anger, she thought. “Why do you keep tormenting me like this? You have Laura. Are you telling me now you no longer intend to charge her?”
“Not at all!” She waited until this news sank in. “I signed the papers for her release this morning. She’s gone from the jail.”
“To where?” he asked anxiously. “Where can I find her?”
“She’s a free woman. I’ve no need to speak to her again. She can go wherever she likes. Perhaps she’s coming here at this very moment. I don’t know.”
He scowled at her again. “Don’t play games with people I love.”
“Ah,” she replied, then placed her hands together and stared at her fingers, thinking, saying nothing, waiting for him to force the pace.
“You said she was responsible,” Daniel Forster declared when he could stand the silence no more.
“No, Daniel. She said that. Personally, I never believed it for a minute. It would have been possible to charge her with wasting our time. But that would have been cruel. She found these two men she loved on that terrible night, one dead, one dying. She regarded herself as their protector and felt a sense of guilt over their fate, perhaps. But I am a detective. I had to consider another possibility: that she was trying to protect the person who was truly responsible. You, perhaps.”
He swore again. Biagio shuffled in his chair but was quiet.
“If you think I’m guilty, arrest me.”
“No, of course you’re not the one,” she continued. “How could you be? You were in bed with her that night. Why would either of you get up and stab her master and his boyfriend just after you made love? Again, what was the reason?”
“You’re fishing,” he murmured.
“No. I merely looked at the sheets, Daniel.”
He reached for a packet of cigarettes on the coffee table and, with a fumbling hand, lit one, took a couple of puffs, then coughed.
“Do you enjoy this?” he asked.
“Oh, yes! Isn’t that obvious?”
“But why?”
“Because sometimes — not always, but sometimes — we manage to put things right. We see a kind of tear in the fabric of the world and we manage to mend it. What else should we do? Close our eyes and walk on by? There are so many people behaving like that already, Daniel. Why choose to walk with the crowd?”
He gave up on the cigarette, stubbed it out, and said nothing.
“You’re so different from the friend of yours I met that sad morning,” she continued. “You hide here, as if the sunlight were your enemy. All the while Signor Massiter is the man about town. A lunch here, an appointment there. Do you know he dined with the mayor the other day? To move in such circles, yet he has not an iota of your talent, I believe, but merely feeds upon it.”
“People like Hugo Massiter are…” He searched for the words. “A necessary evil.”
“Of course. And a successful evil too. You know that young violinist? The American?”
His eyes glinted with interest again. “Amy?”
“Quite. I happened to be taking breakfast near his apartment in Dorsoduro before I came here. She appeared from there very early. With that look. You know? I think… But no. Who is one to judge such things these days?”
“You’re following Hugo?” he asked.
“I didn’t say that. I merely happened to see the American girl leave his apartment. She seemed a little dishevelled. Upset, perhaps. I don’t know. You should ask her when you meet.”
His eyes lost their shine again. “Perhaps.”
“Do you think Signor Massiter has a taste for young girls?”
Daniel Forster sighed heavily. “I’ve no idea. For what it’s worth, I don’t really know Hugo Massiter. I never met him until I came here.”
“He seems to have pursued an interest in… Amy? Quite successfully too.”
“If you say so.”
The idea did trouble him, she thought, but not in the way she expected. There was no sign of jealousy, simply concern.
“Tell me,” he asked her. “Who do you think killed Paul and Scacchi?”
She shrugged. “Someone with a reason, of course. A person who either wanted something from them or felt the requirement to punish them for some perceived misdeed.”
“I told you about the money he borrowed. You called me a liar.”
His habit of exaggerating, of straying from the strict truth, was annoying. “No, I said that I had no evidence to support your claim. That does not mean it’s inaccurate. Simply unlikely.”
“Then who?”
She waited a moment, so that the question would have some impact. The unsatisfactory interview with Rizzo had established only one thing for certain: that Massiter had been anxiously searching for some musical instrument which had come onto the black market. However hard she pressed him, Rizzo maintained his innocence of the superintendent’s murder — and his attack upon her. Nor did he shed any light on the instrument itself, although, if she was right, Rizzo himself must have taken it from Susanna Gianni’s coffin. None of this worried her. Rizzo could not escape her grasp. She would return to him later, time and again, pressing a little harder on each occasion. And one day he would break, bringing the greater prize with him, for it was this that mattered all along.