Goodnight Sweet Prince lfp-1

by David Dickinson

  ‘You are certain? You must swear that you are certain. We have to fill in the forms. For the authorities, you understand.’

  ‘I am certain,’ said Powerscourt, and whispered a last farewell to Gresham as the body slid back into the wall. Lord, now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace, according to thy word.

  ‘When did you last see him?’

  ‘I saw him in Venice about ten days ago.’

  ‘Come,’ said Ferrante, ‘we can do the paperwork in the office. Not in here, I think.’ Powerscourt could see why Italian policemen were always busy. Ferrante was filling in forms as fast as his pen could write.

  ‘Name?’

  ‘Lord Edward Gresham.’

  ‘Address?’

  ‘Thorpe Hall, Warwickshire, England.’

  ‘Occupation?’

  ‘Army officer.’

  ‘Married or single?’

  ‘Had been married. His wife was dead. No children.’

  ‘Call that single. Religion?’

  ‘Catholic.’

  ‘Next of kin?’

  ‘Mother. Lady Blanche Gresham, Thorpe Hall. Same address.’

  ‘Reason for visit to Perugia?’

  ‘Tourist.’

  ‘Address to which body should be conveyed for interment?’

  ‘Thorpe Hall again.’ The family vault, watched over by his weeping mother. Surely even a Gresham would cry when her son came home in a coffin.

  ‘Thank you so much, Lord Powerscourt. Now, while I finish off the forms, perhaps you would like to have a look at these.’ He took a small bag from the desk and shook the contents out on to the table.

  ‘This is what we find in the pockets and so on. Nothing has been touched, except by the blood.’

  There was a train ticket to Rome, first class, valid for travel some five days before. Gresham must have been on his last day in Perugia when they killed him, the last stop before Rome. There was an assortment of small coins and a receipt for a bill from Florian’s in Venice. My God, thought Powerscourt, that was with me, and the waiters, Sandro the gondolier’s hat waving across St Mark’s Square, the mirror on the wall. There was a letter, written by Gresham to himself. My Penance, it said at the top, from Father Menotti SJ. There followed a list of prayers, Acts of Contrition, arcane references to the intricacies of the faith that Powerscourt didn’t understand.

  But wait, he said to himself. If Gresham has his penance to perform, then he must have been to confession here in Perugia maybe, or in Florence.

  ‘Captain Ferrante.’

  ‘Yes, Lord Powerscourt.’ The Captain was half-way down a very long form indeed. He carried on writing.

  ‘I need to ask you a question about the Catholic faith.’

  ‘I am not the priest, you understand.’ Ferrante was refilling his pen with official blue ink. ‘But my brother is. And my wife, I am afraid, she is very devout.’

  ‘Lord Edward Gresham had converted to Catholicism. Early this year he killed somebody. It was revenge. The somebody had killed Gresham’s wife. Gresham was on a journey to Rome. Somewhere en route he was going to say his confession. This piece of paper makes me think he had already done so.’

  ‘There is no Father Menotti in Perugia, Lord Powerscourt. We have checked. I believe there is one in Florence. I have written to him but so far he does not reply. The mails are very slow sometimes. Most of the time.’ Ferrante shook his head sadly at the inadequacies of the postal service.

  ‘If he had said his confession, would he be able to go to heaven? You see, he was very keen on going to heaven to meet his dead wife. Louisa, she was called. He was sure she was in heaven.’

  ‘I think it is like this,’ said Ferrante, continuing to write furiously. Powerscourt saw that he was now signing his name to a number of documents, a great flourish on the F of Ferrante. ‘If he makes the confession, and the priest absolves him, and he performs the Sacrament of Penance, then the state of sanctifying grace is restored to his soul. He will be in the State of Grace. God will receive him into heaven. He can meet the Louisa again, perhaps.’

  Powerscourt felt relieved. He didn’t like to think of Gresham missing Louisa, somewhere between heaven and hell.

  ‘So it is the story of the doomed lovers?’ Ferrante bundled his papers into a folder. ‘Like Romeo and Juliet in Verona, or Heloise and Abelard. This time we have Eduoarde e Louisa. Maybe we should write the opera, you and I, Lord Powerscourt. Italians would love it. Eduoarde e Louisa. The final act could be here in Perugia by the fountain, a huge chorus singing away as the body of Eduoarde is discovered. There is blood everywhere. The lights go down over the cathedral. The ghost of the dead Louisa, she come to sing to her lover’s corpse. Maybe there is the duet. Eduoarde and Louisa on top of the Collegio del Cambio in the piazza. Two ghosts, but what a great aria. That would make the audience look up. Maybe they would cheer. Maybe they would cry.

  ‘Sorry, Lord Powerscourt. I get carried away. I am very fond of the opera. Mrs Ferrante, she say I spend too much money going to the performances. Now it is time for some more coffee. These forms,’ he waved triumphantly at the folder, ‘these forms are finished. Thank God.’

  They were now in some quiet room at the back of the cafe. More black coffee had appeared and a plate of pastries.

  ‘Lord Powerscourt.’ Captain Ferrante was devouring a small lemon cake. Powerscourt saw that there were a large number of these cakes on the table. Perhaps they were Ferrante’s favourites. ‘I think we should speak freely. Nobody can hear us in here. Nobody will disturb us. We can decide what to put in our reports later on. Yes?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘I think, when you came here, that you expected to find that the body was that of Lord Gresham. Is that right? The Commissioner sent me a summary of what it said in The Times about Perugia the day you went to see him.’

  Powerscourt hadn’t mentioned the report in The Times to Sir John. He was quite sure of that. He had mentioned Perugia, of course. Maybe it wasn’t that difficult to combine the two.

  ‘Yes, I was expecting to find that Gresham was the dead man.’

  ‘May I ask you, Lord Powerscourt, why you thought it was Gresham? You read this report in your newspaper, you drop all the other things you are doing, and you come to Perugia as fast as you can. Why?’

  Powerscourt could see why the Commissioner held Ferrante in such high regard.

  ‘We are speaking confidentially for the moment, Captain?’

  ‘We are. I give you my word.’

  ‘It was the way he was killed. Those wounds.’

  ‘And why did those wounds make you so sure? Forgive me, I have a report to write about this murder. It may have been an Englishman, not a native of Perugia who died, but I am still charged with the task of finding the murderer. As you may be too, Lord Powerscourt, but a different murderer perhaps. For you, I sense, this is an end. For me, it may be only the beginning. I can always write in the middle of the report that he was killed by an unknown person or persons. That I have done before, God help me. But I come back to the wounds.’ Captain Ferrante advanced towards another of the little lemon cakes. ‘What was it about the wounds?’

  ‘In the earlier murder,’ said Powerscourt, ‘the one I spoke of, the victim’s throat was cut, the arteries were slit, everything was done to make sure there was as much blood as possible. It was terrible. Your Perugia murder was a copy of the one in England, a direct copy, wound for wound, cut for cut. Once I read the report in The Times with the details of the death, I felt sure it was Gresham. Here, I suspect, the fountain washed away some of the blood. With the other one, there was no water, only the sheets and the carpets. The blood was lying in puddles on the floor.’

  ‘I do not think I want to know very much about your earlier murder, Lord Powerscourt. I am forgetting that.’ Ferrante took another cake as an aid to amnesia. ‘Do you think, forgive me, that the killer was the same person in both our murders, that these wounds are some terrible trademark?’

 
‘I am absolutely certain,’ said Powerscourt, deciding that he too had better try one of these little pastries before they all disappeared, ‘that the killer is not the same person. There are two different killers.’

  ‘Perhaps they should sing an aria together in our opera of Eduoarde and Louisa. The Murderers’ Duet. They could be sharpening their knives on the steps of the Duomo, pricking their fingers so they can splatter blood all over their nice white shirts.’

  ‘I think we may become rich from this opera,’ said Powerscourt diplomatically. ‘But let me ask you a question. Suppose you were English. Suppose you wanted to murder Lord Gresham. You know he is going to be in Perugia. Could you hire a gang of killers here, to do your murder for you?’

  ‘I think you could, if you were in Palermo. Or if you were in Naples. Maybe even in Rome.’ Ferrante was thinking carefully about what he was saying. ‘In Perugia, no. I think not. Of course we have murderers. But these are the citizens murdering each other for love or betrayal or passion or whatever they do these things for. In Perugia we do our own killing. We don’t ask outsiders to come and do it for us. And anyway, who in Perugia would want to kill the Lord Gresham? Nobody even knows who he is. We couldn’t find out who he was until you came.’

  ‘So your experience tells you that somebody outside the city must have come to find him. And then to kill him.’

  ‘Exactly so, Lord Powerscourt. And there is something else.’

  Ferrante walked to the front of their alcove to check there was nobody listening. He came back with more coffee.

  ‘We have found a weapon. It may be the one used to carve the Lord Gresham’s throat. It is long and very sharp. We found it in the corner of the piazza about one hundred yards from the fountain. There is something special about this knife. I tell you what it is in a moment.

  ‘My men, they go round all the butchers’ shops, all the cafes, all the restaurants, all the hotels, all the big private houses where a cook might use such a knife. Ordinary people like the Mrs Ferrante, I tell you, she would not have such a thing. There is no need. My men, they ask these cooks and butchers if anybody has lost a knife. Or if they recognize the one we find by the fountain. They do not. This knife, it is a stranger in Perugia, a foreigner.

  ‘And in the very small letters, along the blade, it says Made in Sheffield. Now, we do not know if this is the murder weapon. But it may be. And it may have come all the way from England. I know the Sheffield steel is famous, but here in Perugia, nobody buys the knives made in England. They buy the knives made in Italy, or in Germany, or in France. Not the knives from Sheffield.’

  Ferrante paused. He smiled at Powerscourt. ‘Let me try to sum up for you, Lord Powerscourt, where you stand. Then you have to do it for me. They make us play this game in the police college. Sometimes it is very good.

  ‘You come to find out if it is Gresham in the fountain. In your heart you think it is, even before you see him. So, you find him. In your heart also, I think you know who killed him. Not necessarily the name of the person. Maybe someone tells somebody else to do it for them. Maybe the killer is obeying orders. I think you know that this killer, the killer of Gresham, may have gone back where he came from, probably to England. True?’

  ‘Very good,’ said Powerscourt. ‘Now let me try.’ Ferrante was eating the last of the lemon cakes very very slowly, one tiny mouthful at a time. Powerscourt hoped Mrs Ferrante made some of them for him at home. ‘You have a body in the morgue. You did not know who it was. Now you do. You also know, I think, that the murderer will not strike again here in Perugia. The reason he came was simply to murder Gresham. He has done that. Now he has probably gone back where he came from. He may have left his murder weapon behind him. You could close your case, Captain Ferrante. Your report could say Lord Gresham was murdered by an English killer, sent here for the purpose. By the person or persons unknown. Your case is closed.’

  ‘I think you are right, Lord Powerscourt. I can close my case. But I wonder where the murderer may strike again. Take care, my lord. These are very dangerous people with the sharp knives. But, come. We must go and see the fountain before it gets dark. And we must think some more about our opera. Maybe we become like those English people, Sullivan and Gilbert? Powerscourt and Ferrante.’

  Captain Ferrante hummed a little tune to himself.

  ‘The beginning, I think I have the beginning. It is in an old English castle at sunset. There is the Lord Gresham, sitting on his battlements, sick with love for his Louisa. He looks out to the great lake in his grounds. She is coming to him in a boat. He cannot see her yet. Listen. He begins to sing . . .’

  27

  ‘Don’t look back. Don’t look round. Not yet anyway.’

  Captain Ferrante was leading the way along the Via del Priori that joined the hospital and the morgue in the university district to Perugia’s main square. ‘I think we are being followed. I have thought it for some time.’

  He looked across at Powerscourt. Powerscourt seemed more interested in a couple of very old Italian ladies, bent almost double, their bags of vegetables trailing along the road, streams of Italian pouring towards the pavements.

  ‘Can you tell if they are Italian or English?’

  ‘I cannot. They are a quick sight in a doorway here, a drawing back into the shadows there. The brown coat, I think. Sometimes the hat, sometimes not. Have you been followed before, Lord Powerscourt?’

  ‘I have, Captain Ferrante. But that was many years ago in India.’

  Delhi, was it, or Calcutta? Delhi, he thought. And it was so difficult, he remembered, because there were so many people, so many faces that looked at you automatically if you were a white man. But only two of them were following you with knives, following the Englishman, one of the rulers. He remembered the urge to run, to get away from his pursuers as fast as possible, to sprint across the Maidan and disappear into some Government building and the safety of its files. A white man’s building, a ruler’s building. In there you would be safe. And then the knowledge that to run was to make yourself even more conspicuous, more visible still.

  ‘Well, we must think what to do about it. Or who it might be. Do you have any idea who it might be, Lord Powerscourt? Come, we shall talk of it later in your hotel. See, here is the Piazza IV Novembre. And here is the fountain where they find the body.’

  On their left stood the Cathedral of San Lorenzo, the outside still unfinished after four hundred and fifty years. To their right the handsome Palazzo dei Priori with fine windows and Gothic sculptures, chains and bars of gates serving as memorials of ancient victories over Perugia’s enemies. Stretching away towards the Piazza Vittorio Emanuele, the Corso Vannucci, named after Pietro Vannucci, Perugia’s most famous painter, Perugino. A great statue of King Vittorio Emanuele Due himself stood in the piazza. Powerscourt wondered if anybody had counted the numbers of statues of this Vittorio Emanuele all across his newly united country. He was always on his horse. He was in every major town and city in Italy, looking down on his people. Sculptors must have built their own memorials to him, so much business had he brought.

  The fountain rose in three graceful tiers, a pair of twenty-four-sided pools topped by a bronze basin.

  ‘The people come to look at this fountain from all over the world,’ said Ferrante sadly. ‘Always, I think, they tell of the sculptures round the side, the delicate workmanship of the craftsmen, the little statues that show the heroes of Perugia’s history. They forget what it meant to the people of the city. They come here to get the fresh water. They come to do the washing in the little pools. I am sure all that was much more important to the people six hundred years ago than the sculptures. Fresh water on top of this hill, they must have thought it came from God.

  ‘But look.’ Ferrante drew Powerscourt right to the edge of the fountain. Two nuns were praying on the opposite side, their heads bowed. ‘They dump the body in the upper tier here. The doctors think the Lord Gresham was dead before they take out the knives. Then I think they cut h
is throat and the other parts. The blood flows over the top of this marble rim and down into the lower pool. I think they block up the passage of the water out of the fountain over there. So the fountain fills with the blood of the Gresham.

  ‘That is what the nuns see, on their way to the cathedral behind us. They see the marks on his hands and in his side. And because the water cannot find the way out, there is still a great deal of blood in here when the nuns come out from their service, even though the body has been taken away. Blood mixed with water is flowing over the rim of the Fontana Maggiore, down on to the street.’

  A small group of pilgrims joined the nuns, kneeling on the hard stone of the square. The water flowed on, clear again now, dancing its way down into the fountain, the sound of its passage drowned out by the prayers and passing crowds.

  ‘Why do you think he was left here, Captain Ferrante? Did they mean to do it? Or were they surprised?’

  ‘I think they mean to make all these wounds. But I do not think they wanted to leave him here. I think they come into the piazza by one of these narrow streets. They mean to come out by another one, perhaps the one we walked down just now. Then they hear the noise. Maybe they hear the nuns coming. Do they sing, on their way to the church, those nuns? The killers panic. They make the quick cuts to the body. They run away. The good sisters find the corpse, the marks, the blood. They think it is a sign from God. When they come out from their praying, the body has gone. My men, they take him away. What do the nuns think? He has risen perhaps, risen from the dead. Here in Perugia, we have a second Resurrection at four o’clock in the morning. They are still praying now. They have never stopped. Always now there is a nun by the side of the fountain.’

  Captain Ferrante made the sign of the cross, thinking perhaps of his brother the priest, the pious wife reminding him of his duties.

  ‘Let me buy you a glass of beer, Captain Ferrante. My hotel is just down here. Please, I insist.’

  The two men set off down the Corso Vannucci. Stone griffins, symbols of Perugia, watched their passage. Living eyes, human eyes, spies’ eyes marked their short journey. University students were everywhere now, walking arm in arm up the street, sitting in the cafes, talking about their lectures, planning revolutions, falling in love. The sun was setting far away across the Umbrian hills in a pink sky, criss-crossed with black.