by Mark McCrum
‘The coincidence was so strange, Diana thought, that it seemed – somehow – meant. It was almost, she thought, as if they were supposed to be having this conversation, on this terrace, on this warm September night. The two ladies decided they had to do something. How about this, Diana said. How about trying to get Poppy out here, next year, to this very place, and then confronting her. Making her aware of the harm she’d done, the hurt that her actions had led to. There were surely others, too, victims of her casual promiscuity, her attraction to established couples; maybe they could find them – somehow – and get them out too.’
‘This sounds a little … would you say … crazy. Would you really go to such lengths, for a lost love, so many years later?’
Francis shrugged. ‘You’re right. They are a little crazy. Both of them. Diana, in particular, is a woman obsessed. At home we say, “Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned”. It’s a quote from one of our famous playwrights …’
‘Scorned?’
‘Rejected, turned down …’
‘Respinta.’
‘I imagine.’
‘It’s a good one.’
‘They were lucky,’ Francis went on, ‘in achieving their first objective, getting Poppy out here. Zoe had her email from the Guardian course and managed to persuade her that if she wanted to continue to improve her memoir-writing in a beautiful place she should consider Villa Giulia. Was it a little naughty of Zoe to drop in the names of some of the more celebrated tutors they had had at the villa over the years, not to mention some of the more distinguished guests? Perhaps it was. But never mind, Poppy took the bait and wrote back. This sounded perfect, she said, because she was trying to get her husband interested in writing a memoir of his life as a diplomat, and this seemed like the ideal introduction.
‘The other half of the plan was harder to action. Short of advertising, how were they going to find other women – and perhaps men – whom Poppy had wronged? Diana was convinced there were plenty. If Poppy had done this twice, and thirty years apart, surely she had done it other times? Maybe what they needed, Diana suggested to Zoe, was a two-part process. Get Poppy out here, not reveal themselves or their interest, and then encourage her to tell stories. Then they could find out exactly what she had got up to. The confrontation, involving other victims, could happen later, either here or perhaps, under the guise of a reunion, back at home.
‘Unfortunately for Poppy,’ Francis went on, ‘Diana had other plans. Perhaps the whole idea of the “confrontation” had been a ploy to get Zoe to write to Poppy, and encourage her to come out here. At any rate, before they had done either of the things they had discussed the year before, and perhaps again this year, Poppy was dead in the sauna. Zoe was horrified.’
‘Diana had meant to kill her all along,’ Marta said. ‘How did you get them to tell you all this anyway?’ she added.
‘Neither of them have told me anything,’ Francis replied. ‘But Zoe let me know, let us all know, early on, that she keeps a journal, and I’ve been reading that.’
‘She’s confessed to all this in her journal?’
‘No confession. As she sees it, she herself has done nothing wrong. Other than go along with Diana’s idea of a confrontation. But her journal details the horror she’s been feeling, knowing that Diana was very likely responsible for the death in the sauna, and then of course the follow-on strangulation of poor Sasha.’
‘So where is this book? Can I see it?’
‘It’s not a book, I’m afraid. It’s all on her laptop. Buried in a file that she thought no one would find to read.’
‘How did you get access?’
Francis explained. ‘So there it all was,’ he went on, ‘in front of me in writing. The original plan. The shock at what happened last week. Zoe’s fear of talking to Diana about it, in case Diana should turn on her. Her failure to understand what happened to Sasha. If that was Diana’s doing too – why? Had Sasha found something out? And then threatened to turn her in? She was scared she herself might be implicated. Because of their plan; and because she knows. She’s in a panic.’
‘And what about Mel and Belle. Do they know too?’
‘No. They appear to know nothing. Zoe thinks, meanwhile, that either Diana had planned this all along or Poppy must have said something that tipped her over the edge. And then, when she knew she was taking a sauna every morning she couldn’t help herself.’
‘But what about the poison? She must have planned a murder if she brought cyanide with her. It’s not something you’d easily buy in Castiglione dell’Umbria.’
‘I agree.’
Marta said nothing. For all of five seconds she stared at the floor, taking this all in. Then, like someone waking from a dream, she jumped to her feet. ‘God help us,’ she said. ‘We need to move. This woman may not even be safe.’
‘Zoe?’
‘Yes. And Diana. Where is she? We need to confront her right now.’
FIFTEEN
The door to Michelangelo – Diana’s room – was locked. Francis shouted for Diana but there was no reply. Marta too. Then they looked at each other and had the same thought. Did they even have time to fetch Gerry and get the master key?
‘It may be too late,’ said Francis. ‘We’d better break it down.’
He threw his upper body heavily against the door, but it proved stronger than he’d imagined. The villa was old. There had presumably been times when it wasn’t just occupied by a bunch of arty types who trusted each other enough not to lock their rooms.
‘You OK?’ said Marta. ‘That looked painful.’
‘I’m fine.’ It had bruised his shoulder a bit, but in the circumstances he was good for one more go. Tellingly, there had been no cry of protest from inside. Either the murderess was cowering, waiting for the inevitable end, or something worse had happened.
Francis took several paces back and ran at the door again. There was a heavy thud, and the sound of splintering wood, but the lock held firm. There was still no sound from within.
‘I think we’d better try and get the master key,’ said Marta. ‘The danger is you twist the lock and then even with a key we can’t get it open.’
‘OK.’ Francis turned, and raced along the corridor to Gerry and Stephanie’s room. That too was locked.
He ran downstairs and out into the courtyard.
Three ladies and Liam looked up from their card game.
‘Are you all right?’ asked Zoe; she looked terrified, Francis saw.
‘Have you seen Gerry?’ he asked. ‘Or Stephanie?’
‘Stephanie went into town in her car,’ Belle said. ‘But I think Gerry’s up in the studio.’
Francis sprinted up the gravel driveway. Halfway up towards the main gate he turned right into the studio. There was no one in the outer room, just an array of big colourful drawings of flowers laid out on the table (Belle does Georgia O’Keeffe). But in the inner room he found Gerry, standing with a brush in his hand, staring thoughtfully at a huge canvas. This one was green and pale blue, with touches of pink, altogether more optimistic than the dull grey and brown squares in the villa corridors.
‘Gerry, sorry to interrupt. We urgently need the key to Diana’s room.’
‘Michelangelo. Is she all right?’
‘No. I don’t think so. You need to come now.’
Gerry put down his brush, resting it carefully on the edge of his box of oils, which sat on a raised island in the centre of the floor. Then he turned and followed Francis down. As Francis broke into a trot, he did too. In a minute they were at the door to Tintoretto. Gerry dived in and returned with the master key.
‘I’m sorry,’ Francis said, as they arrived back at the battered door of Michelangelo. ‘We tried to break it down.’
Marta, standing waiting, was on her phone. ‘Sì, immediatamente,’ she was saying, and then another burst of Italian. Francis caught ‘non mi interessa’ then something like ‘chiamarmi se vuole.’ She clicked off. ‘Sorry.’
Ger
ry had the key in the lock. ‘I haven’t used this for years. Let’s hope it works.’ He turned the key, the lock clicked back.
Gerry pushed the door open, gestured politely for Marta to go first. The two men followed.
‘Madonna Mia!’ cried Marta.
Diana was hanging from the heavy brass chain that held up the little chandelier, a leather belt around her neck, her fine features distorted in a ghastly rictus of shock, as if at the last moment she might have regretted her theatrical finale. Below her, on the tiled floor, one of the antique chairs was on its side. Near it was a champagne flute, the tulip glass smashed, the neck intact.
‘Christ,’ said Francis, feeling a rush of nausea. There was no inappropriate hunger this time – instead he found himself dashing for the en suite with sour vomit welling up in his mouth. He reached the toilet and threw up. ‘Christ,’ he repeated, as his breakfast and the dark coffee that had washed it down splashed into the white bowl. He shivered, and reached out for a handful of toilet tissue from the nearby roll. He wiped his mouth, got to his feet, and returned to the room. He was desperate for water, but he didn’t quite trust the supply away from the drinking water tap in the kitchen. This was just the kind of big old house to have a dead rat in one of the tanks.
Gerry and Marta were standing their ground, staring at the dangling corpse. Even in death, Diana was nicely turned out, in a pullover and skirt combo, with smart black leather boots underneath. The belt, Francis realized, was the one she had bought in Gubbio. So had she planned this even then? Even before Sasha? Or had she improvised?
‘Sorry,’ he said to the others.
‘Please,’ said Marta. ‘It’s a perfectly normal reaction. I am only used to it because … I have seen this kind of thing before.’
‘What on earth happened?’ asked Gerry.
‘She took her own life,’ said Marta.
‘I can see that. But why?’
‘She was the one,’ Francis explained to him, ‘who killed Poppy. And also Sasha.’
A terrible thought had occurred to Francis. Perhaps the piece of writing Diana had been working on so studiously for the last couple of days was her suicide note; perhaps it was here in the room.
It took him no longer to find it than it had to find Zoe’s journal. It was sitting in an envelope decorated with a pretty floral design which was propped up on the dressing table by Diana’s beloved lipsticks. On the front it read, in capitals: GERRY AND STEPHANIE.
‘It’s addressed to you,’ he said to Gerry. ‘D’you want to open it?’
‘Please,’ said Marta, intervening. ‘I must take this. Just wait one moment.’ She pulled out a pair of thin white plastic gloves from her jacket pocket and slid them on. ‘We can read it together,’ she continued, taking it from Francis, ‘but it is obviously important evidence. We cannot have any other fingerprints on it, for example.’ Carefully, she eased the flap of the envelope open and pulled out the piece of paper inside, which she held by one corner.
‘This is some nota di suicidò,’ she said, studying it.
It was. Four pages pulled out of the A5 notepad, carefully covered in Diana’s clear, swirling hand. ‘Shall I read it out loud?’ she asked Gerry.
‘Please,’ said Gerry, and Marta began.
Dear Gerry and Stephanie, I am so very sorry to have to do this, in my favourite room in your lovely villa, where I have spent so many happy September holidays. As you know, for almost twenty-five years now, I have come here every summer, and right from the start the experience, very different of course to the adventurous holidays David and I used to have, racing in our open-topped MG down the Route Nationale in France …
And so it went on, in Diana’s classic rambling style, to explain what Francis and Marta already knew. That Poppy had been Diana’s nemesis, thirty years ago. That Diana had never forgiven her. That she was very sorry but what she and Zoe had planned, which was a confrontation, was never going to be enough for her. That she had never originally intended to shut Poppy in the sauna, she had intended to poison her, with cyanide, which she had understood from her researches on the Internet to be the quickest and most efficient way to kill someone, with the advantage that it was hard to trace, not that she was bothered about that. But that when she realized Poppy took a sauna every morning after her swim she couldn’t resist the idea that had come to her, of trapping her in there. It had been so easy to tamper with the door, just loosening the screws of the internal handle, so it fell off when you opened and shut the door. Without a screwdriver, you couldn’t put it back, though if Poppy had been more of a handywoman, like her, she could have held it in place with one hand while she turned it with the other. But Poppy wasn’t clever like that. Others, menials, men, had always done that sort of thing for her.
Marta paused and raised her eyebrows. ‘She really didn’t like her very much, did she?’ she said. She took another pair of thin plastic gloves from her pocket and handed them to Francis, nodding for him to slip them on. Then she passed over the letter.
‘Your turn,’ she said.
Francis took it, and read aloud to his audience of two.
I’m terribly sorry, but I just wanted the silly bitch, for five minutes, to feel a tiny dose of the daily pain that she inflicted on me for thirty long years. Was that so very terrible? I am not a bad person, nor even a particularly vengeful one, but sometimes I do feel that people should be made to understand the consequences of what they’ve done.
Her underlining of ‘consequences’ was so hard it had torn the paper.
Funnily enough, because David was working in London when he met Poppy, she never met me. I looked very different in those days – my hair was dark for a start, so I doubt she had any idea who I was, especially since I reclaimed my maiden name a couple of years after the divorce. Locked in her gilded cage of self-obsession, she had no idea who Zoe was either. Or what she’d done to ruin her life, years before. And the lives of who knows how many others. She was blissfully ignorant of what was about to happen to her.
But I did want her to know what I’d done. I didn’t want to miss out on that. So once I knew she was in there, and yes, my plan had worked and the handle was on the floor, I knocked on the glass door of the sauna and told her that David had been my husband, and that Robert Heddon, another of her conquests, had been Zoe’s beau. ‘Didn’t you realize?’ I cried out to her. And then I left her.
I knew that no one else was likely to hear. The villa walls are thick and Fabio was down at the pool as usual, checking the chlorine content as he did every morning after Poppy had had her swim. It was a routine that takes him half an hour. So I knew there was plenty of time.
How did I poison her? That was easy too. I’m always a bit early for breakfast, as I like to be first down. So I knew Poppy liked a little warming espresso after her swim and before her sauna. She was always hopeless with the Gaggia machine, so it was easy for me to offer to help her, as I had done on previous occasions. And on that last morning of her life add a little something to the mix that she wasn’t bargaining for. She did complain that the coffee was a little bitter, but I told her they’d changed the brand of beans. Ha ha ha!
There was one thing that I didn’t tell Zoe. Or any of you, because I don’t believe in sharing all your unhappiness all the time with everyone you meet, like the younger generation seem to do nowadays, bleating their every little personal upset out on Facebook and Twitter and what have you. Personally, I think you should have one person who is very close to you, with whom you can share the most intimate details, and that’s enough. Of course, if that person has been taken away from you, in the cruellest possible way, then maybe you have to keep your troubles to yourself. Exercise a little stoicism, a neglected virtue, in my opinion. Of course, my local GP knew, dear Henrietta, and the consultant at the hospital, lovely Dr Gupta, but otherwise the fact that I have only three months to live was not one I wanted any of my friends – or you – to know. The cancer that I had five years ago, and got over, as I thought, h
as returned, this time to my bones, so the diagnosis is not a good one. Dr Gupta has in fact given me until Christmas. So I particularly enjoyed this year, knowing that it would be my last at glorious Villa Giulia. And maybe I am just a silly, superstitious old woman, but it was as if God knew it too, giving us the most perfect weather I’ve ever had out here, day after day of glorious sunshine.
I’m sorry about Sasha. Clever little thing, she realized that it was me who’d killed Poppy, so she had to go too. A little bit too psychic for her own good, wasn’t she, with her oh-so-clever character analyses. I knew after I’d spoken to her that evening that she knew it was me who had done away with Poppy. All I can say in my defence is that she would have known nothing about it. She had a nice strong sedative – Propofol – before I twisted that fuchsia scarf of hers around her pretty neck. The mushrooms were a red herring – or rather, a pinky-orange herring! Perhaps it was selfish of me, but I wasn’t prepared to face the music for what I see as justice, even if others might see it as a crime. I didn’t want to undergo any of that police palaver that Francis loves to write about. I just wanted to leave on my own terms, in my own time, with the sunlight coming through the curtains in my favourite room. A final glass of lovely Prosecco, and then a leap into the unknown. Well, I’ve always believed that murderers should be hanged, so you can’t accuse me of inconsistency.
So farewell, my dear September holiday friends, and Francis our tutor too. I enjoyed meeting you and chatting with you about my writing style. With the best will in the world I am never going to be Chekhov now, am I? But perhaps, in my funny old way, I have managed to put your advice about writing, Francis, into my final act in this beautiful, though often cruel world. I have, I hope you will agree, shown not told my anger, which has simmered quietly all these years. And if you love yourself, as I am not ashamed to say I do, I have killed my second most important darling – myself. Someone else killed my most important darling, thirty years ago, even if he did, at some pathetic level, go on living. In fact that fucking bitch worse than killed him, because she also killed any idea I had had of him being the decent, upright, loyal, faithful, fun man I had always believed he was, prior to that. For society’s sake, I had to stomach that terrible betrayal and pretend it didn’t really matter to me. But it did. Oh yes, it did. And this week I was finally able to serve my revenge as it should be, like the delicious Villa Giulia lunch prepared every day by dear, kind, beautiful Benedetta and her team – cold.’
