Season of Storms

by Susanna Kearsley

  I didn’t envy the police the task of taking down a man that large. “He’s still the only one they’ve caught, I take it?”

  “Not to worry. Once he realized that the others had left him on his own he started talking to the authorities. It’s only a matter of time before they find Daniela and her husband.”

  My head turned so sharply my neck hurt. “Her husband?”

  “Oh, yes.” He said that so dispassionately that I had to look more closely to be sure he wasn’t simply covering his emotions, but he really did seem to be neither surprised nor concerned about Daniela’s marital status. He went on, “Celetti, I think his name is—the police knew him by a few others, apparently. Pietro said it was Celetti’s idea that Daniela marry Forlani—an elderly man with millions, he must have seemed a sure investment. Only then of course he went and made that will leaving everything to the Trust, which wasn’t quite what they’d expected, so they had to find a different way.”

  “Stealing from the houses that the Trust acquired.” I didn’t need to see him nod agreement. I already knew from my time in the crypt last night how the scam had been worked, with the forgeries taking the place of the genuine articles, which in their turn had been passed on to private collectors who weren’t too particular where their collectibles came from. Curious, I asked him, “Did you know what they were up to?”

  “I suspected. It was the chalice, you see, that Giancarlo brought back from Sirmione. Poor Giancarlo,” he said, breaking off for a minute with a slight frown. “If he hadn’t loved drama so much he might still be alive. He must have known everything when he phoned me, the day before you and I went to Sirmione, but he wouldn’t just tell me, not that way . . . he wanted the big scene—the jeweller’s assistant as witness, the chalice as prop, himself as the clever detective revealing the plot.” He sighed. “All I could get out of him that day on the phone was that he no longer thought we were dealing with a simple case of theft. I knew that myself, when I looked at that chalice.”

  “But how?”

  “I’d been down to the villa myself the day after Giancarlo died . . .”

  “Lighting Daniela’s fires?” I asked him, innocent.

  “Putting them out, actually. And I’d seen the chalice sitting in the cabinet, same as always, where it ought to be. So when Teresa’s brother handed me a second chalice, I knew one of them was wrong. And when Daniela took the chalice back next morning without comment, then I knew she was involved, somehow.”

  It must, I thought, have caused Daniela a bad moment or two when she’d learned—as I assumed she would have learned—that the chalice had vanished from the jeweller’s shop in Sirmione. She’d likely breathed a huge sigh of relief when Alex had handed the chalice back to her, with the story that Pietro had stolen it, a story she’d played into when she’d sent Pietro into hiding.

  Alex was talking. “I wasn’t entirely sure what to do with my suspicions, though. I wanted to be very certain before I called in the police, so I got in touch with a friend of mine—the same one I’d phoned when Giancarlo had first raised suspicions of theft, the friend who’d first put me in touch with the Trust . . . he’d given them his summer home on Sardinia. I asked him if he’d check again, to see if anything like this had happened there. He’d donated quite a few paintings along with the house, and some very fine glassware. I called him on the Tuesday, I think, and on the Wednesday he went back to tour his former summer home with an appraiser.”

  I admired the man’s initiative. “And?”

  “None of the paintings they looked at was genuine. All of them had been replaced by forgeries. Good forgeries,” he said. “World class. Daniela and her husband didn’t mess about. They had a whole network of artisans doing the stuff for them; they knew what they were doing. My friend said he would never have questioned the paintings himself. He was angry about it, really angry. Not because the original paintings were gone, you understand—he’d never liked them all that much, or he wouldn’t have donated them in the first place—but because he couldn’t prove the theft, and so anyone might accuse him of pulling a fast one himself, hanging on to the original paintings and putting in forgeries just before leaving the house. I gather,” said Alex, “that someone from the Trust politely raised that possibility, when the appraiser got in touch.”

  I’d never thought of it, myself, but I supposed Alex’s reputation might have suffered quite a blow, too, if it had later been discovered that he’d given over to the Trust a bunch of worthless copies of the treasures from the Fourth Crusade. “So didn’t they believe your friend, then, the people from the Trust?”

  “Oh, he managed to convince them.” Alex smiled. “He can be very convincing, at full volume. The trustees themselves were the ones who called in the police.”

  “The police were involved?”

  “Yes, I’m sorry about that. They had me bound to secrecy, on pain of death. Not that you wouldn’t have kept the secret, too,” he hastened to assure me, “but it was their game, and I gather they figured that the fewer the people who knew the details of what was going on, the less the chance of someone slipping up and maybe tipping off Daniela and her crew by accident.” His eyes apologized. “I’m sorry, I’d have told you if I could have.”

  “Never mind,” I told him. “You can tell me now.”

  I’d have missed his smile if I hadn’t glanced over, it was that brief, but the amusement lingered in his eyes as he began with, “So I can. The idea was to arrange a sort of sting—someone from the police would pose as a buyer of Byzantine art, and make contact with Daniela, and then when it came time for the exchange . . . well, there they’d be, caught in the act. In the meantime there’d be officers watching the house and the grounds, to make sure nothing was taken off-site without our knowing.”

  “The gardeners!”

  “That’s right. They weren’t too good at gardening—my grandmother noticed that—but they did a decent job of keeping an eye on things. I had one of them keeping an eye on you, as well,” he admitted, “only he seemed to be making you even more nervous, so I called him off a few days ago. I shouldn’t have, I suppose—if he’d been watching you last night . . .” He left the sentence hanging there unfinished; coughed to clear his throat. “Anyway, they knew about Pietro sleeping rough down here, and—”

  I set down my make-up, feeling suddenly chilled. “So that was Pietro that Poppy surprised?” I could still feel the threatening presence behind me, in the darkness of the corridor, the day the storm had knocked the power out. Shrugging the shiver aside, I said, “It’s a good thing that we were all here, then, to come to her rescue. The man’s already done murder once, that we know of.”

  Alex corrected me. “Twice. I don’t really believe that my maid ran away to Milan. She just wasn’t the type to do something like that. It’s more likely she caught on to what was going on—Giancarlo did say that he wasn’t the only one who’d noticed things missing and moved—and she probably made the mistake of saying something to Pietro. They couldn’t have turned her, she was too good a Christian to be dishonest. So . . .” He spread his hands in a gesture of finality. “The police did find some evidence of blood down here, but no body, not yet.”

  “Down here? In the dressing-rooms?”

  “Not yours,” he reassured me, as I looked around. “The one at the end of the passage. They’re thinking that he might have kept her body here a day or so, until he could dispose of it.”

  Which might have been, I thought, why Pietro had come charging down the hill at us that first day, why he hadn’t wanted anybody poking round the theatre. Something else stirred in my memory at the mention of a body being disposed of. “Oh, Lord,” I said, “the rose garden. Alex, have your men checked the rose garden? Someone was digging a new bed there, right after . . .”

  “They noticed that, too, yes. There’s nothing there now. They’ve been thorough, I’ll give them that,” he said, of the police. “They’ve even recovered at least one of the fakes from what’s left of
the villa.”

  Forgetting the maid for a moment, I frowned. “How do they know that it isn’t the genuine article? I couldn’t tell.”

  “You would have been able to see the difference, if you’d had a chance to compare the items. Giancarlo threw a spanner in Daniela’s works, you see. Not only did he take off with one of their best pieces, but he managed to leave us enough of a trail that the jeweller had to do a bunk to keep from getting caught. He hadn’t finished with his work yet, but Daniela and her husband had already struck a deal with a buyer—not our undercover chap, but one we didn’t know about—and that buyer didn’t want to wait, and so the three of them had to find a way to switch the genuine Fourth Crusade things for the fakes, without anyone spotting the unfinished details. That’s why they set fire to the villa,” he said.

  I frowned harder. “I thought they did that to get rid of me, make it look accidental.”

  “No, burning the villa was part of the plan. They set it very scientifically, to do as much damage as possible to the cabinets where we kept the Fourth Crusade collection, so there wouldn’t be very much left to recover. As you said yourself, it’s rather difficult, at first glance, to tell whether a melted lump of metal is a fake or the genuine article, and as far as they knew no one would have any cause to suspect that the items weren’t genuine.” He looked to see that I was following the logic. “All they had to do, Daniela and her husband and Pietro, was to take the real things from the villa and put in the replicas. That’s what I’d imagine they were doing in the crypt, when you met up with them—they were making the switch.”

  I was still trying to absorb the fact that they hadn’t set the fire because of me. I’d been carrying the guilt of that around with me all day, reasoning that if it hadn’t been for me there wouldn’t have been a fire, and if there hadn’t been a fire then Rupert wouldn’t have died. “I heard them say that they were going to change the plan . . .”

  “Well, yes, they’d meant to set the fire tonight. This buyer of theirs had booked tickets, Pietro said, for tonight’s performance and intended to come here by one of the holiday coaches, along with the rest of the audience, to collect his purchase.”

  Which explained why the stolen items had been packed in a suitcase. In all the confusion of the fire, no one would have noticed one more member of the audience returning with a suitcase to his tourist coach.

  “At least, that was the plan,” said Alex. “Only as Pietro said, things didn’t quite work out the way they’d expected.”

  “Because of me.”

  “Because of you.”

  I didn’t need that part explained—I knew that my showing up in the crypt had put Daniela and her husband and Pietro in a no-win situation. The three of them could hardly have let me go on my way unmolested, not after what I’d seen, because I would have blown the whistle on their thieving. But keeping me silent meant giving up their meeting with their buyer, because without me there could be no first-night performance, no chartered coaches, no audience.

  No wonder they’d wanted to kill me, I thought. In one move I’d ruined what must have taken them weeks to organize. Now, instead of a neat handover of the stolen artifacts, they were forced to improvise a getaway.

  And so the villa had been set on fire a day ahead of schedule. The replicas at any rate still had to be destroyed, and since no one would ever have had cause to suspect that the genuine items had been removed from the villa, any works of art ‘lost’ in the fire would have been paid for by the insurance. And as an added bonus, I’d have been conveniently eliminated.

  I frowned. “I don’t understand, though, if they thought I’d be killed in the fire, why did Daniela run away? I mean, Pietro was under suspicion of stealing—all right, I can see that. And her husband presumably went to connect with their buyer. But Daniela could have stayed. With me dead there wouldn’t be anyone here to accuse her of anything.”

  His eyebrows lifted. “What makes you think that I wouldn’t have suspected her?”

  It was, I thought, a difficult thing to explain to a man, how certain women always seemed to get away with murder. It had everything to do with beauty and sexuality, and how it was used. I’d have been willing to bet, for example, that Alex’s friend with the summer home in Sardinia, no matter how intelligent a man he was ordinarily, had not believed that Daniela could be capable of pulling off a swindle. Even when he’d been confronted with the fake paintings, he’d almost certainly have made excuses for her, saying that she must have been a minor player in the game, that she couldn’t possibly have known the full extent of what was going on . . . “Most men wouldn’t,” I said.

  “I’m not most men.” He left a little pause, as though he wanted that to register. “And anyway, she did stay, to begin with. She was standing outside the villa when we got down there, wrapped in a dressing-gown, doing her damsel in distress. Had they brought out your body I’m sure she would have been ready with a story to tell us about what you’d been doing there.” His voice had gone harder than normal, and stealing a look at his face I decided—not without a certain flush of pleasure—that he really and truly hadn’t been taken in by Daniela, and that he would have held her to account if anything had happened to me. “Only you came out alive,” he said, “and sometime shortly after that, because of that, Daniela disappeared. No one noticed her leaving.”

  “She can’t hide forever.”

  “Don’t kid yourself. She and her husband will have met up with their buyer by now, and if he paid them even half what the Fourth Crusade objects are worth they’ll be able to hide in style for quite some time.”

  “Oh, Alex, I am sorry.”

  “What, about my losing the collection? I don’t mind,” he brushed it off. “My own claim to ownership was questionable at best. My grandfather stole them from a house built by a man who had stolen them eight centuries before, and how they came to Constantinople in the first place is anyone’s guess. No one owns things like that,” he informed me. “They’re passing through time, and we’re only custodians, really.”

  “But you’d like to have them back, surely.”

  “If you’re asking would I like to see Daniela and her husband caught, then yes, I would, but because I want justice for Giancarlo, and for Rupert, not because I want my things back. Losing you,” he told me, “would have been the greater loss.”

  He was leaning in to kiss me when a knock at my dressing-room door interrupted.

  I smiled. “That’ll be Den, come to call the half-hour. He’s developing fatherly timing already.”

  But it wasn’t Den. It was Poppy. She responded to my invitation to come in a little timidly, her gaze moving instantly to Alex.

  “Oh,” she said. “I didn’t . . . I mean, I thought you were alone. I’m sorry.”

  “That’s all right,” I said, but my attempt to ease her nervousness was clearly unsuccessful.

  Shifting from one foot to the other, she said, “Den sent me to tell you it’s half an hour to curtain up.”

  I could hear Den himself, down the hall, knocking at Nicholas’s door—we didn’t have a public address system backstage, like most theatres had, so Den had to do things the old-fashioned way, playing callboy.

  I didn’t know whether Poppy was helping him to pass the word to anyone but me, but having delivered her message she certainly didn’t seem in a hurry to go anywhere. She hovered in the doorway, looking faintly unhappy, and I remembered what Madeleine had told me this morning about how awful Poppy felt about leaving me down in the crypt, and how badly she’d wanted to come and apologize. Even though the half-hour before curtain up was usually a time I liked to spend alone, preparing to go on, I simply couldn’t leave her standing there like that, not when I knew from experience how rotten it felt to feel guilty. And I didn’t want Poppy to carry her guilt for as long as I’d carried my own.

  “Come and sit down,” I invited her.

  “Oh, no, I couldn’t, I . . .”

  Alex rose, pushing his chair back. “H
ere, she can have my chair. I have to go and get ready, myself, to make the announcement before you go on.” He gave me the kiss, though, in spite of our audience. “I’ll see you after.”

  When he’d gone, I looked towards the door again. “Poppy, it’s all right, really. Do come in. I’m not upset with you or anything.” I showed her my most reassuring smile. “Please.”

  Anyone watching us would have thought I’d called her on the carpet. Her feet dragged as she moved to take her seat, the very picture of reluctance. I took heart from the fact that she was wearing the necklace I’d bought her in Sirmione, the tiny shells clicking together as they brushed the red wool of her jumper.

  “You ought to be,” she said, in a miserable tone. “Upset with me, I mean. It’s my fault you almost got killed.”

  “Oh, Poppy.”

  “If I’d gone and found somebody straight away, like you’d asked me, then—”

  “Then you’d all have been walking right in on a very dangerous situation,” I told her. “And you might have made things worse. A lot more people might have been hurt. No, your timing was perfect.”

  “It was?”

  “And I’m told it was you who convinced the others to follow Max.”

  She glanced away, embarrassed. “Well, he was acting like dogs do in films, you know, running away and then coming back again, and barking, like he wanted us to come with him.”

  “So there you are. You actually helped save my life then, didn’t you?”

  Her small face brightened for a moment, then clouded again. “But Rupert had to help as well, and now he’s dead, and—”

  “Oh, darling,” I cut her off, wanting to wipe the sad look from her eyes. “What happened to Rupert, that was an accident. Sometimes things . . . well, they just happen. They’re not anybody’s fault.”

  That only seemed to make things worse. Her eyes brimmed with moisture. “You’re being so . . .” Breaking off, she blinked the tears away and went on steadily, “And I’ve been so horrible to you. Mummy told me so, and she was right. I’ve been childish, and I’m sorry.”