by Mark McCrum
Here we go again, thought Francis. Summon the violins. Though as he’d understood it, Diana had actioned the divorce, not her ex.
‘So why d’you think Sir Duncan wanted to leave her in any case?’ Moretti asked.
‘The question I was always asking, when I saw them together,’ said Diana, ‘was why he’d ever wanted to be with her in the first place. I mean, she was no great looker, she was tiresomely snobbish, and quite stupid to boot. I just imagined it must be the Demon S.’
‘The Demon S?’ asked Moretti; the other officers looked similarly puzzled.
‘Sex,’ said Diana, baldly. ‘One can only think she must have been extremely adventurous in the bedroom to get him to put up with the rest of the package.’
Ricci looked over at Ceccarelli and they both stifled a laugh.
‘I’m not trying to be funny,’ said Diana.
The detectives composed themselves.
‘It’s often the case, in my experience, that this is the explanation for the unlikeliest couples. So,’ she went on, ‘if that side of things had waned, and he had suddenly seen what he was left with, like Titania in Midsummer Night’s Dream, he had a problem.’
‘Like Titania,’ Ceccarelli queried. ‘In midsummer … mi dispiace, non capisco.’
‘In Midsummer Night’s Dream,’ said Diana. ‘It’s a play. By Shakespeare. Our great English playwright. The Queen of the Fairies, Titania, takes a love potion and falls in love with a donkey, and then it wears off and she sees what she is embracing – a donkey.’
‘Ah yes,’ said Moretti, ‘I remember this.’
Ceccarelli nodded thoughtfully. He clearly didn’t.
‘Especially,’ Diana went on, determinedly, ‘if there’s another woman involved.’
‘You think there’s … another woman?’ Marta asked. ‘Seriously?’
‘You never know, do you,’ said Diana. ‘But there generally is. Men are very lazy, in my experience. They often say that they just want to be free, or they’re sick of the status quo or whatever. But almost always they’ve lined something else up. Women are different.’
‘Are they?’ asked Francis, glancing discreetly at the Italian men present; there was no visible protest on their faces at this outrageous generalization; perhaps they agreed with her.
‘I’m afraid so,’ Diana continued. ‘I’m not saying, necessarily, that there was, or is’ – she raised her eyebrows – ‘a mistress, just that it’s a possibility. I also have my suspicions about his daughter. Bear in mind she’s his daughter, not hers. She might never have liked her stepmother. And if Poppy’s gone and Duncan gets the house, then unless there’s some special arrangement in place, it will eventually pass to her. So maybe she’s involved. Maybe she’s a friend of the mistress. Maybe she even introduced the mistress to her father.’
She sat back with a ‘put all that in your pipe and smoke it’ look on her face.
‘This is all very interesting,’ Moretti said. ‘But it’s speculation, no? You didn’t like Poppy, and you do like her husband. But you have no evidence for any of this.’
‘I don’t need evidence,’ Diana replied. ‘I can see it in his face. That he’s relieved. Oh yes, he looks sad, and concerned, of course he has to play that part. But underneath you can see, he’s delighted – excited even – that she’s gone.’
Moretti made a note and looked round at her colleagues.
Diana’s other possible suspect was Liam. ‘I mean who is he, what’s he doing here, that’s what I’d like to know. He’s a very strange man, by anyone’s standards. He says he likes drugs. But there are no drugs here, unless he’s taking them privately. He says he’s a poet, but this is a prose writing course, not a poetry course, it never has been. He’s a relatively young man – why does he want to spend a week with a lot of much older people? He lives in Londonderry, in Northern Ireland – that’s quite a long way away. Don’t they have creative writing courses there? You would imagine, being Irish, that the place was stuffed with them. So either he hasn’t done his research properly or he’s got some other agenda.
‘Poppy’s father was a general,’ she went on. ‘Who served in Northern Ireland. During the Troubles, in the 1970s, you know what they were?’
‘Your colonial war with the Irish,’ said Moretti.
‘It was never colonial,’ Diana replied tersely, ‘as the inhabitants of Northern Ireland, the majority of them, want to be part of our United Kingdom. Still do, to this day. This is what foreigners never understand. But you’re right, it was a war, though we always tried to gloss over that fact. Now, say Poppy’s beloved papa was in charge of some operation that had resulted in the death of one of Liam’s family, or colleagues’ – she raised a suggestive eyebrow – ‘Liam might well be acting in revenge. Years later. You know, or perhaps you don’t, what long memories the Irish have. A few years is nothing to them. You sit with them in some bar and they’ll tell you about stuff that happened in the seventeenth century, as if it were yesterday. So …’
She smiled, tightly, and looked meaningfully at them.
‘I thought it was we Italians who went in for vendetta,’ Ceccarelli said.
‘Oh no, the Irish are much worse, believe me. I was married to one.’
‘You think Liam might have killed her?’ Moretti asked.
‘You asked me for my suspicions,’ Diana replied. ‘I’m giving them to you.’
‘And what about Sasha?’
‘She obviously saw something. Or knew something. She was a bright little piece, Francis knows that. The other evening she did a character analysis of a couple of us, didn’t she, Francis?’
‘She did.’
‘Myself and Liam. It was surprisingly clever. Where she got her information from I don’t know, but underneath that silly show-off manner of hers, she was a sharp cookie. Maybe she somehow revealed to Liam that she knew what he’d been up to.’ Diana nodded significantly. ‘So yes, I think she found something out. Something compromising. So she had to go.’
‘That’s what you really think?’
‘It’s a possibility, isn’t it? She was far too young to have enemies in the normal way of things.’
Luckily, Liam came after Diana in the running order. He had ‘of course’ heard the scream this morning, why wouldn’t he have? It had shattered the neighbourhood. And he’d run straight out of his room and along to Sasha’s. Was the room called Botticelli? Francis had seen him there. He had been as shocked as the rest of them.
‘Why did you choose this course out here?’ Moretti asked him.
‘This course? Out here?’ Liam looked taken aback for a moment, but only a moment. ‘Have you ever been to Derry? Where I come from. In Ireland.’
‘No,’ Marta replied.
‘It’s a beautiful spot. Steeped in history, as they say. I love living there. You’re right on the border, so you can get out to Donegal within the hour, up to Malin Head for a bit of fishing should you wish. But it rains a fair amount. Particularly in July and August. So I fancied a bit of sunshine before I went back to work. And I love Italy. Always have done, ever since I came out to Rome after uni in my early twenties.’
‘And what were you doing in Rome?’ Moretti asked.
‘Teaching English as a foreign language. I went on from there to Perugia for a while.’
‘To Perugia.’ Moretti nodded. ‘This is our questura, headquarters, Ceccarelli’s home town. How long were you there?’
‘For a year or so. Hung around the Università per Stranieri. I loved it there.’
Ceccarelli nodded approvingly.
‘So you have a little Italian?’ Marta went on.
‘Un poco.’ He smiled. ‘I can get by. So solo mettermi a sedere e ordinare da mangiare.’
This brought a smile to the Italians. ‘He can order a meal,’ Moretti explained to Francis.
‘E cosa piú importante, ordinare da bere.’
She laughed, in the way that foreigners do at quaint English humorists. ‘And, more importan
tly, a beer,’ she glossed to Francis. ‘OK, so we will continue the interview in Italian. È sicuro di volerlo fare?Non vuole che Francis capisca?’
‘Come preferisce lei.’
‘OK. I think for the benefit of Mr Meadowes, we’ll stick with English. So what are you doing now, Mr O’Donoghue, for work?’
‘I teach. Like Francis here. Only to a younger crowd.’
‘And what are you teaching?’
‘Creative writing and Irish studies. At Ulster University. Magee campus. We have quite a reputation for our little course.’
‘Creative writing. So why, if I may ask, are you out here, on a creative writing course, if you already teach creative writing?’
‘A good question,’ said Liam. ‘I’ll be honest with you. I’m sorry, Francis, I should have levelled with you before. I’m doing a little survey. Of other creative writing courses. Seeing what other people do, and how they do it.’
‘With the idea of using some of the techniques you discover yourself,’ Moretti asked. ‘Stealing ideas, even?’
It had been on the tip of Francis’s tongue to put the same question, but he had decided that unless he badly wanted an answer to something that came up, he was going to let Moretti conduct the interview. She had invited him to sit in on a police enquiry in progress, which was, to a crime writer like him, acutely interesting. He had read police interviews in books; he had watched them, endlessly, on TV (‘For the benefit of the tape, I am showing the suspect Exhibit 34b, a bloodstained handkerchief’, etc.), but he had never been privy to the real thing, and certainly not to the real Italian thing. It was a luxury to be given this opportunity and he wasn’t going to screw it up.
‘Something like that,’ Liam replied. ‘Though I wouldn’t say stealing ideas. It’s more like a comparative study. Seeing how other teachers tackle the same problems. Show not tell, ding-dong dialogue, that sort of thing. Francis here knows what I’m talking about.’
‘And are you impressed by his teaching skills?’ asked Moretti.
‘I am,’ Liam replied.
There was a pause, while the Irishman looked round at them in anticipation. Do you really believe me? his eyes seemed to say.
‘OK, thank you,’ said Moretti. ‘Do you have any further questions, Francis?’
‘No,’ Francis replied. There was part of him that would have liked to quiz Liam about Northern Ireland, how much he’d been involved, whether he’d ever directly crossed swords with the British Army, exactly what he’d known about the activities of Poppy’s papa – but it wasn’t the right time to do that now.
‘Do we believe him?’ asked Moretti, when Liam had gone. The four Italians had a consultation in their own language, which Francis could make neither head nor tail of, though he recognized a few words. Then she turned to him. ‘Francis? What do you make of this untidy Irishman? Is he really out here to study creative writing courses? Is it at all likely he was acting in revenge for some long-ago action of Poppy’s father, as Diana seems to think?’
Francis shrugged. ‘One thing I’ve learned is that anything’s possible. But Liam’s not top of my list of suspects. You have to think: if he is the murderer, a) how did he know that Poppy was going to be out here on this course, at this time? And b) even if his surveillance of her movements was so good that he did know all about her holiday arrangements, why did he want to do it here in any case?’
‘Exactly what we were saying,’ said Marta, nodding at her colleagues. ‘Why here? Why not at home in the UK?’
‘For a murderer who had planned very carefully, there might be advantages of taking your victim out of their home environment. I mean, it’s probably easier to get to them when they’re away from their own space and their usual routines. There’s also less danger of any casual witnesses. Locals who know Poppy, for example, witnessing something they’re not supposed to witness. But to counter that, to decide to murder someone on a residential course like this, which you’re also part of, would require a steady nerve, I’d say. Because there’s no running away afterwards, is there? You’ve got to stay and sit it out.’
‘These are good points,’ Marta said. She looked at her colleagues.
From the sour expression on Lorenzo Ricci’s face, it was clear he could do with some persuading.
‘The only thing I can think,’ Francis went on, notwithstanding, ‘is that whoever killed Poppy assumed that they would get away with it. The whole sauna thing. They didn’t think the necroscopo was going to be suspicious and demand an autopsy.’
‘Even if they were using a traceable poison like cyanide?’ said Moretti.
‘Cyanide is interesting,’ said Francis. He knew quite a bit about it, having used the poison for one of the murders in his third George Braithwaite mystery, All Souls Day. Because of the rapidity of its action it was the preferred suicide agent of the Third Reich; also, famously, the poison of choice, diluted in Kool-Aid, for the mass suicide of the nine hundred plus members of the Jonestown community in Guyana in 1978, and the substance that the Bosnian Croatian general, Slobodan Praljak, drank publicly at the International Criminal Tribunal in November 2017 when his guilty verdict was returned.
‘It has a very short half-life,’ he explained now, ‘so if blood samples aren’t obtained quickly, it becomes untraceable. If you left a body for even a day or two a toxicology test wouldn’t find an elevated concentration of the poison in the blood.’
Moretti turned to the egg-bald prosecutor. ‘Leonardo?’
The procuratore shrugged and said something in Italian which sounded very much like, ‘How would I know, I’m only the freaking prosecutor.’ At any rate it ended with the word ‘procuratore’ and made the others laugh.
‘I think you’re probably the expert here, Francis,’ Moretti said, then something else in Italian. You see, I told you it would be a good idea to have him along, was Francis’s best guess, as it brought nods from the older two and a studiedly blank expression from Ricci.
‘The other relevant point,’ Francis went on, ‘perhaps a little controversial, is that if our murderer was a bit of a gambler, which maybe he – or she – was, then maybe they thought they were more likely to get away with murder out here than back at home. I’m not criticizing your system of justice, but you don’t have coroners in Italy, do you? As I understand it there’s no official death investigation agency.’
‘This is true,’ said Moretti. ‘But we have the prosecutor.’ She nodded towards Sabatini. ‘And the USL, the local public health structure, to which the necroscopo is obliged to make report.’
‘But the decision on whether to have an autopsy,’ Francis continued, ‘remains with the necroscopo. And as I understand it from the little look I had online, the necroscopo doesn’t have to recommend an autopsy in the case of suspicious or violent death. As they do at home. In some of these cases there is no autopsy.’
Moretti looked over at Sabatini, and a rapid Italian interchange ensued. ‘Usually,’ Sabatini said, frowning, ‘it is the police, or myself, who will make that decision. About autopsy. Though yes, in this case, it was the necroscopo who first requested this. Maybe a different doctor would have a different opinion. But this one, he had a fixed opinion, based on some things he found at the death scene …’
‘I see,’ said Francis. ‘And once he, the necroscopo, has asked for a post-mortem, are you bound to go along with it?’
‘Bound?’ asked Sabatini, puzzled.
‘Obliged,’ said Marta. ‘In tal caso, sei obbligato a ordinare l’autopsia?’
Sabatini turned back towards Francis. ‘We arrive. We listen to him. He tells us what he thinks. We decide.’
‘I see,’ said Francis. ‘So he was convincing … about … whatever it was he saw – or found – at the death scene.’
Sabatini turned again to Moretti, who translated again. Convincente.
‘Yes,’ said Sabatini. ‘He was … convincente.’
‘What did he see that so convinced him?’
Sabatini looked
over at Moretti, who nodded. ‘There was a widening of the eyes, the central part, what do you say, Marta?’
‘The pupil.’
‘The pupil, yes.’ He smiled. ‘Like in a school.’
Francis smiled back. ‘Exactly. Same word, different meaning.’
‘Also a particular smell,’ Sabatini went on, ‘associated with cyanide. The smell of mandorle.’
‘Almond nuts,’ said Moretti.
Francis nodded.
‘Also, some ipostasi, lividezza …’ He looked over at Marta.
‘The bright colour of the skin, after death,’ she explained.
‘Lividity,’ said Francis. That was another classic symptom of cyanide poisoning.
‘Li-vi-di-ty,’ Sabatini repeated, with a smile. ‘The same word. Almost.’
‘Though if she’d been in the sauna for some time,’ said Ceccarelli, ‘she would be a bright colour … in ogni caso.’
There was a short silence, broken by Moretti. ‘So, Francis. All that apart, you’re serious in thinking that our murderer might think he would have a better chance to get away with a murder here than back at home?’
‘If Poppy’s death was planned,’ he replied, ‘as it surely was, then being out here, in this place, on this course, was part of the plan. So I would be interested in trying to understand why that was.’
He looked round at the prosecutor and the policemen. Sabatini and Moretti were nodding; Ricci was looking away, a scowl on his face, as if trying not to listen. Or was he offended by Francis’s aspersions on Italian justice? This was, Francis was aware, a sensitive area with the Perugian police, after the trial, conviction, acquittal, retrial and eventual re-acquittal of Amanda Knox and Raffaele Sollecito for the murder in that city of fellow student Meredith Kercher, an eight-year saga which had seen both the police and the legal system come under sustained criticism from foreign, and particularly US, media.
‘Also,’ Francis went on, ‘you have to think that this does rather cut down on the suspects. Because whoever got Poppy out here to kill her had to be in a position to suggest that she came, if you follow me. On this course, to this villa. I mean, take Diana, for example, who has been coming here for over twenty years. Say she had Poppy in her sights, and had planned to murder her here, for whatever reason. Even if she’d known her before, in some other part of her life, which is perfectly possible, how would she have persuaded her to come out here now to do this particular course?’
