by Tim Parks
‘I reckon it would have happened in his flat,’ Stan was saying.
Morris was too tense to respond. The low space under the roof was lit by light filtering through the tiles. The air was curiously fresh; evidently any smell here escaped upwards rather than down. All the same, it would be wise to bag the body. There were plastic sacks against the wall.
‘I suppose the problem is that with other people renting there the last five years, any traces will be gone.’
Stan stepped forward and examined the heap of rubble in the middle of the floor.
‘There could be somebody under here, come to think of it.’
Now!
Morris raised his arm and he was glad, glad to be killing again. Glad to be back in the saddle. Come what may.
He raised the heavy candlestick but then was overcome by a sudden desire to vomit. Cain, Judith, Brutus, they all flashed across his mind. He had a terrible feeling of déjà vu. Hadn’t he collected those paintings precisely so as never to kill again?
Do it!
Absolutely determined, Morris raised his arm violently and the big candlestick with its fat burning candle struck the low attic ceiling. He hadn’t thought of that. The candle tumbled out of its heavy brass base before the latter could be brought down on the faint gleam of Stan Albertini’s bald spot. The light shifted drastically, the flame guttering as it fell from ceiling to floor, then flaring again as, in its now horizontal position, the candle found a generous supply of wax. Morris felt the room spin, a whirl of shadow and flame. Stan swung round. ‘Whoa, careful there! You’ll start a fire.’ Both men went down, Stan to grab the candle, Morris because he had fainted. He was out cold.
Part Two
Chapter Twelve
All’Avvocatessa Carla Cogni
Carissima Carla,
You ask me to send you a full account of my movements in the month leading up to my arrest and imprisonment, to help you in my defence. I shall do my best and just hope you won’t mind if I digress now and then. Solitary confinement is solitary indeed and without phone or Internet I may as well pass the time this way as any other. Then what appears to be digression may actually turn out to hold the key to the case, who knows; to date I remain as bewildered as anyone else as to who could have carried out such a strangely brutal, yet, in a curious way, as I felt at once when I discovered the body, beautiful murder.
A month before my arrest takes me back to where? 22 March? I don’t have my diary with me, so I might get a few days mixed up. Do you want to hear how I got my honorary-citizen’s scroll framed and was all set to hang it on the wall when I discovered they’d spelt ‘imprenditore’ wrong, with a double ‘t’ ‘imprendittore’? I was with my daughter trying to nail the thing up over the piano and she laughed and said they must be taking the mick out of my accent because I always got the doubles wrong, not pronouncing them when they were there and introducing them when they weren’t. Actually, I don’t think that’s the case at all. I’ve always taken great care over the pronunciation of double letters, which alas the English in their general linguistic slovenliness ignore and simply pronounce as one letter. And no, Carla, this is not one of the digressions I was warning of. I’m not digressing at all. I mention the language issue because it has frequently occurred to me that I am always considered the first suspect for a crime because I am a foreigner, I have an accent, or, even worse, because I have only the very slightest of accents. We’ve all seen in recent years how easy it has been for the police to accuse blacks, Arabs and Slavs whenever there’s some violent street crime, or even a perfectly ingenuous American like Amanda Knox, and how satisfied the public always is to suppose that a foreigner must be responsible for every ugly calamity on Italian soil. You should definitely ask yourself if this isn’t an issue in the way I’m being treated. A murder occurs within a relatively closed community— a state-run museum—in which there is just one foreigner, and what’s more a foreigner who more than any other has camouflaged himself as one of us, has demanded our approval for his achievements, has become a major benefactor of all kinds of civic institutions, has distinguished himself, we could say, as exactly the kind of cultural product we would wish our own nation to produce, if only we educated our children properly. Damn him! He puts us to shame. Obviously he is guilty! I should say here that the first time I met Dottor Volpi he made his distaste for foreigners, and in particular Anglo-Saxons (he appeared unable to distinguish between Americans and English) all too evident, passing the most disparaging remarks about a respected English novelist who had curated a prestigious art exhibition in Florence and criticising out of hand all foreigners who wrote about Italy in any way, as if they were somehow terrorists and should be repatriated at once. That, Carla, is the kind of cultural context that Morris Duckworth has always had to contend with in Italy. I shall elaborate on this a little further when we come to the matter of my son’s trial. However, right now I have my break for some prison-yard exercise. Just fifteen minutes and completely alone. Under the rain by the looks of it. Why they need to keep me away from the other prisoners I can’t imagine. Perhaps they think I will crack sooner this way. The Italian judiciary always spends more time trying to persuade people to confess than actually building a solid case against them. I suppose it’s cheaper and easier. Of which more after my break. I shall let some rain run down my cheeks and imagine the drops are tears. The truth is I’m beyond crying. The world is too absurd. I must be the only man who ever lived to have been wrongly accused of murder twice. Perhaps—I return to my pen to scribble a last word—having given me that honorary citizenship, they had to find some way of marking me out as foreign again. Having given me the freedom of the city, they felt obliged to put me in gaol. I was set up for a fall.
To the Mayor of Verona
Egregio sindaco, onorevole Dottor Lunardi,
Forgive me for writing to you out of the blue, not the vast and wonderful blue of God’s heavens either, but the deep mental indigo of this suffocating prison cell. I have time on my hands.
Forgive also the miserable quality of this notepaper and biro. It is all I have.
I write first and foremost to thank you, for the honour you conferred upon me in granting me the freedom (!) of the fair city of Verona, for your solicitousness in coming to my son’s trial, and, more generally, for having run the city so well over the past five years, facilitating the work of businessmen like myself who, without your attention to efficient infrastructures and your abhorrence of red tape, would be even more hard-pressed than we already are.
Congratulations are also in order, I believe, and I extend them gladly. It is not easy for me to get news here in solitary confinement, but a guard was kind enough to confirm that you have indeed been re-elected, and at the first round of voting. Frankly, I would have been immensely surprised by any other result; nevertheless it was a relief to hear that a man of your stature and wisdom remains in Palazzo Barbieri and I can only send you my warmest compliments. Your success is richly deserved.
I won’t deny of course that I write as a petitioner and I appreciate at once that very likely my plea may not and perhaps cannot be granted. As you know, I am being held on charges of murder. The injustice of my arrest seems so evident that I struggle to enter into the mentality of one who needs to argue his case. I write, then, simply to beg you, as you prepare for your second term of office, aware of course of the many pressing demands upon your time and energies, to pay a little attention to my plight. What grieves me most about being in gaol is not so much the physical constriction and mental loneliness, which I hope I bear with dignity, but the fact that my being here prevents me from comforting my wife at a time when our daughter has left home leaving only the briefest of notes and no indication of her whereabouts. If the police show as much incompetence in their search for her as they have in their investigations of this murder, I fear we may never see her again. There is also the simple fact that once out of here I can set to work to find the real murderer and so clear my name. Any in
fluence you can wield in encouraging the magistrates to grant me bail would be most welcome.
I remain your humble servant,
Morris Duckworth (an honorary citizen dishonoured)
Carla, I’m back. It’s pouring out there. So much for spring. Where was I? The truth is that last month I was distracted by a situation that had been developing with my daughter. Do you remember Massimina? I think I brought her along once many years ago when we had to defend ourselves against those fanciful claims that we were adulterating our Cabernet with methanol. Remember? She was a charming ten-year-old at the time, all giggles, ribbons and curls. Now she’s a young adult studying art at university. I was in two minds about allowing her to do this. Not that she doesn’t have talent. There’s definitely a creative streak in the Duckworth psyche (excluding my son I’m afraid). But I was worried that she might be forced to experience my own disappointment of approaching the artistic life only to be expelled from it, denied access, forced to apply my creativity to the rather more prosaic world of wine-making and provincial real estate. I say this so you get a sense of how important this art exhibition at Castelvecchio is for me. Doubtless the prosecution will say, Duckworth killed because he was deeply, pathologically attached to this pet project which the victim was threatening to deprive him of.
Anyway, since February or so I had become concerned because Massimina, who is usually very lively and always out seeing people, clubbing, dancing and so on, had fallen to staying indoors, draping herself moodily on one chair or another, paying exaggerated and morbid attention to the cat, or simply wriggling on the floor, and texting all the time. Antonella supposed that she must be in love. The girl is twenty after all and tolerably pretty, as Jane Austen would have put it. She has an indolent, teenage coltishness, between innocent and femme fatale, always showing too much midriff and cleavage. I know we men are not supposed to notice such things, but it is rather hard not to worry for one’s daughter when she all too readily lets her parents’ male friends glimpse her knickers or even nipples. There was an occasion when a friend of ours, Stan Albertini, had come to dinner and Massimina turned up in her bathrobe, slumped on the sofa and was so busy with her text messages she wasn’t even aware of how much she was showing, top and bottom, without knickers on this occasion. Stan is in his mid-fifties, but anyone can see the kind of frustrated old goat he is. Maybe the police would have a real murder to accuse me of if Stan ever laid a finger on my daughter.
I said to Antonella, if it is love it seems to me an unhappy, possibly sick love and we should do our best to warn or help. I began to quiz the child a little more about her college and teachers and eventually evinced, in the kind of teeth-pulling conversations one has with one’s teenage children, that she was rather taken with her art history professor, who, on further questioning, turned out to be none other than Professor Zolla.
This is rather extraordinary, is it not? I mean, that I could have been dealing with a man for some months without appreciating that he was also my daughter’s art history professor. I often wonder how many tie-ups there are in our lives that we know nothing of and that might completely alter the scenery for us if we did learn about them. What, for example, if it turned out that one’s partner, brother or sister, or even oneself, were, without knowing it, the natural offspring (unbeknown to the legal father of course) of some high-flying personage, a cardinal, say, or a politician, or a business magnate—the sort of plot Dickens loved to dream up—and that this notable fellow were keeping a watchful and protective eye on the family, from a safe distance; one would thus tend to have a positive view of the world as rather benign and generous, because everything would tend to go well with this man tirelessly pulling the strings for you. Alternatively, one could imagine an implacable enemy one knows nothing about, a powerful public figure who wishes you ill for reasons that lie beyond your ken, or perhaps began long before you were born. In my case that would explain so much.
But back to Massimina and Zolla. I found it hard to understand how a lively girl like my daughter could entertain an attraction for this boring, besuited, bureaucratised academic. To test the water, I put it to her that her art history professor, my co-curator, was an utter nobody without a shred of imagination, citing, as proof, his decision not to request Caravaggio’s Sacrifice of Isaac for our murder show merely because ‘Abraham didn’t actually go through with the killing.’ Can you imagine such literalism? She seemed indifferent to my indignation, remarking that she was glad the painting wouldn’t be shown because the story of Abraham and Isaac was too obscene for words. At least Zolla, she said, was always modest and sweet and didn’t see himself as God. Unlike a certain celebre impredit-tor-re.
I was astonished. Under the pretext of being concerned as to the real extent of her artistic talents (though of course I am extremely concerned), I asked Zolla directly what he thought of my daughter, her performance and prospects. This was perhaps a week after I had caught the man sobbing in Dottor Volpi’s office but two weeks before the hasty and ill-advised announcement from Volpi that I was to play no further part in an exhibition that I myself had conceived and devised. But I’m running ahead of my story. Thus quizzed, Zolla made an entirely unconvincing show of
a) pretending not to know who the girl was,
b) pretending not to be aware that I had a daughter, and
c) pretending not to know that there was a Massimina Duckworth in his class.
‘There are more than fifty students, in Module 1 Art History,’ he said.
My feeling is that it is impossible not to be aware of Massimina, however many students there are in the class. The way she dresses simply forces two very generous breasts on every male beholder. ‘She speaks very highly of you,’ I told him. ‘I think she may have a crush on you.’ He smiled with dimpled false modesty and said that amazing as it might seem at least half of the students had a crush on him, a story so improbable I let it pass without comment. The man is an amoeba. In any event, at this point I felt it imperative—it had now been more than a month since my daughter had ceased all activity except messaging—to get into her mobile phone.
And I did. I took her with me one day, forced her to join me I should say, if only to get her out of the house, to look at a Last Judgement in a rather remote village called Gorgusello (near Sant’Anna). I’d started thinking that a good way to close Painting Death and send people home with something to think about would be an image of the Just being separated from the Damned, something the subject of murder naturally inclines one to think about.
I persuaded her to drive, since she only got her licence last year and needs practice, and to drive of course she had to stop texting and put her phone in her handbag. Since the bag was between us as she drove and she was concentrating on the road, it wasn’t hard to slip a hand in the bag, pull the phone out and drop it into my jacket pocket. The things we do for love! I tell you all this, I suppose, Carla, to give you a sense of how completely preoccupied I have been with my family, how utterly unlikely it is that I would have found the time, never mind the mental energy, for murdering anyone (do people realise what hard work that must be?). We got out of the car to go into the church, little more than a barn really, but with this extravagant three-metres-by-four image of fiery demons poking forks up the backsides of the good burghers and merchants and, yes, priests of the early sixteenth century, when suddenly Massimina lets out a yell because her phone is missing. I told her it must have fallen between the seats in the car and she slithers off on her heels to find it. Finally I had time to see what these messages were.
There were none. She must cancel each one as it arrives. Who does that? But just as I was slipping the thing back in my pocket a message arrived. I knew that if I opened it and left it in the phone she would realise something was up. But there was no time to reflect. I opened the message. The name of the sender was Gio. The text read. ‘Ahhhhhhhh, how I miss you!’ I read it and cancelled it, relieved that it was the kind of contentless ejaculation that didn’t requ
ire or deserve a response. I had been lucky.
But the name, Gio?
I had already slipped the phone back in my pocket when it occurred to me that Dottor Volpi sometimes called Angelo Zolla, Gioletto (Out of affection? An-gioletto? Or ironically? Because of his being such a dandy? I don’t know.) Of course Gio would normally be Giovanni, or even Giovanna, but there was an outside chance that Angelo actually liked to be called Gioletto. The thing to do would have been to check the number to see if it corresponded to Zolla’s mobile. But in my anxiety not to be discovered I had cancelled the message and the number with it. I could perhaps have checked the calls made and received but Massimina was already coming back into the church in a panic because she hadn’t found her phone. I gave a last glance at the Devil opening his fiery mouth to chew on women disfigured by syphilis and hurried out to the car where, in a grand flurry of search and concern, I eventually produced the phone from under the maps in the glove compartment. Grudgingly, Massimina accepted she must have slipped it there herself. ‘Who else, if not?’ I ribbed her and got her to drive me back to Sant’Anna.
I mention Sant’Anna because, as you know, I had asked one of my subcontractors to ask one of his subcontractors to dig the foundations there for the prefab school that the Christian Democratic Union had promised to voters in order to stay in power. I had to visit Sant’Anna because not only was there an issue of a damaged war memorial, but it now turned out that an underground stream passed right through the site, so we had to assess the feasibility and cost of moving it, or alternatively shifting the whole project two hundred metres up the hillside, filling in what we had dug so far and starting from scratch.
I pointed out to the priest, a rather splendid man, tall, austere, moody, a real man of God, that the monument (one of those fifties bathroom-mosaic-on-cheap-cement things) was so ugly that they should have thanked me, or rather the dozy dozer man, for giving them this golden opportunity to replace it. But the reason I mention all this to you is that, looking into the foundation excavations, then boiling with muddy water after the spring rains, it occurred to me that if ever anyone wanted to hide a body, then this was the place to do it. It could be buried four metres deep where no one would ever suspect anything. Why I should have thought such a thing I cannot imagine. A presentiment perhaps. All this anyway to underline the fact that the police must be mad to imagine that someone of my extensive resources would kill a colleague in the hole-and-corner way this murder was carried out without disposing properly of the body. Only a loser sticks a knife in a man in an empty building and runs for his life. Can’t the police understand that if someone of my wealth, knowledge and proven organisational abilities had decided to commit murder then there would have been no trace of a body and no leads at all to go on? A little respect, please!
