The Immaculate Deception

by Iain Pears

  ‘I talked it over with Mary – I would have talked it over with you by that stage, my dear, but I thought that the less you knew the better – and decided that it might be best to keep well out of it. I wasn’t joking when I said I wanted nothing to jeopardize my retirement, and this was nasty. Then the whole business of the ransom demand began. I didn’t understand it – still don’t, in fact – but at least it was simple. I was merely concerned that you should not be there at the handover. It was potentially very dangerous indeed, so I bullied you into staying in the car. If anyone was going to get shot because I was stupid, then it really had better be me. The rest was as you imagine, except that the person who collected the money didn’t really resemble Sabbatini. But don’t ask me what he did look like, as I didn’t see him very well.’

  Flavia digested all of this, although what was at the forefront of her mind really was the desire for a whisky and a cigarette. ‘Not your finest hour,’ she said drily after a while.

  Bottando looked suitably mortified.

  ‘Elena Fortini thinks that Maria di Lanna was murdered on the orders of Sabauda, and that Maurizio was going after him.’

  ‘And was going to get it irretrievably into the public domain by burning the painting?’ Bottando said. ‘Possible. I think he was right that it would have needed something quite dramatic to avoid it being hushed up. No good just going to the papers, they wouldn’t have touched it.’

  ‘It still doesn’t answer why that particular picture,’ she said grumpily.

  ‘Does it matter?’

  ‘No. Just a detail. But he went to a lot of trouble, and if all he wanted was something that would catch the attention there were simpler ways of going about it.’

  ‘I thought you reckoned it had some cunning meaning,’ Argyll said.

  ‘Evidently not. But I can’t see the connection. It’s got a happy ending.’

  ‘No, it hasn’t.’

  ‘Yes, it has. Macchioli told me.’

  ‘That’s the sanitized Renaissance version where everything has to come right. I looked it up for you. In the real thing, poor old Procris gets popped with Cephalus’ magic arrow and that’s it. No goddess to bring her back.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘So nothing. I just thought I’d demonstrate my superior powers of research. You always did say that Sabbatini was a bit weak on ideas.’

  Bottando would have become impatient with the way the conversation was going had not the warm night air and soft light on the terrace lulled him and everyone else into a surprisingly peaceful mood. Four people who knew each other well, enjoying a relaxing evening together, talking, speaking softly in the way you do when the light fades to streaks of pinkish blue and the only sounds come from the cicadas in the woods.

  ‘As for Sabauda, I don’t know. It’s always been known that the security services were every bit as violent as the terrorists. Saying they acted on direct orders is a big leap, though. And I can’t see how that bank statement helps. Unless the report explained it. But as we don’t have the report, and only have a photocopy of the statement …’

  He paused, distracted by a noise that seemed to be getting louder. An intrusive bumping and scraping of metal suggested that someone was driving, badly, down the stony, irregular path that led to the house. He looked at Mary, who shrugged. Not expecting anyone.

  A few seconds later, an ancient red Fiat chugged into view and pulled up outside, its little engine heaving with effort. The driver switched off the engine, making the sudden silence seem all the more remarkable, and then got out, slamming the door in irritation.

  ‘Oh, God, it’s Bossoni,’ Flavia said, peering at the figure, dimly lit by the terrace lights. It was the night air, she thought afterwards. That was why she felt nothing more than mild irritation. An unwelcome guest, breaking the atmosphere. Not one of the party. An interloper into their conversation.

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Journalist and police informer,’ she said, as the sweating reporter walked round to peer in the faint light at the wing of the car, dented badly when he drove into a boulder halfway up the track. He seemed from his movements to be very cross. ‘Don’t know which is worse.’

  Bossoni kicked the car, then turned to the house and walked purposefully towards them. ‘You should do something about that driveway,’ he called angrily from a distance of about thirty metres.

  ‘It’s a track, not a driveway,’ Mary Verney said mildly. ‘What do you think this is, the suburbs of Milan?’

  Bossoni snorted. ‘Well, at least it still goes.’

  ‘Good evening,’ Flavia said. ‘What are you doing here? How did you find us?’

  ‘Oh, easy enough. Tapped your mobile phone. Traced the call your husband made to you. One of these little devices. You can buy them in shops these days. Amazing little things.’

  ‘I see. But what do you want?’

  ‘Well, two things. First, I was wondering if you knew where to find Elena Fortini?’

  ‘I thought you wouldn’t go near her?’ she said, noticing the permanent sheen of sweat on Bossoni’s forehead shining in the lamplight, giving him a slightly unearthly appearance.

  ‘I’ve changed my mind.’

  ‘I don’t know. She was planning to disappear. It seems she probably has.’

  ‘Damnation.’

  ‘Might I ask what you want her for?’

  Bossoni looked slightly embarrassed as he pulled a gun from his pocket. He looked at it quizzically, as though he was wondering how it had got there. ‘I was sort of planning to kill her,’ he said, his voice dropping to a whisper as if he too was reluctant to disturb the calm. ‘Just as I think I shall have to kill all four of you. I’m sorry about that.’

  He pointed the gun at Flavia.

  ‘Just a second.’ Mary Verney spoke in the fluttering tone of voice that Argyll recognized as the one she used when she was about to do something unfortunate. ‘Why, exactly, are you going to kill us? It’s a bit rude, you know.’

  Bossoni considered whether to reply, then evidently decided it made no real difference. ‘I want to ensure that certain matters do not become generally known. Which means getting hold of certain documents that should remain confidential, and ensuring that those people who know of their existence remain silent. Does that make you feel better?’

  He smiled apologetically.

  ‘Oh, dear,’ Mary Verney said, wringing her hands. ‘I’m afraid you make no sense to me at all. But I assure you, young man, that it won’t be necessary. Will it, Jonathan?’

  ‘I don’t think so,’ Argyll said, after considering the question objectively.

  ‘Well, I do think so,’ Bossoni replied, still quiet. Maybe it was the darkness, maybe the gun now which made him so calm. ‘I don’t want something accusing me of murdering that woman getting into the wrong hands.’

  ‘We don’t have anything,’ Flavia said.

  ‘I know that,’ Bossoni said, almost apologetically. ‘I got everything from Sabbatini. But you know about it, you see. So …’

  Flavia looked at him. ‘Did you kill her? That poor woman?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because I was told to. And I do what I am told. Just as I did with Sabbatini. Now I think it’s time to work on my own for once.’

  ‘Who told you?’

  He shook his head. ‘Sorry.’

  ‘I don’t suppose we might persuade you to go away?’ Mary asked.

  ‘I doubt it.’

  ‘Look,’ she said, her voice suddenly hysterical. She picked up a brown briefcase, making Bossoni swing his gun around to her. ‘Please don’t do this. You’d regret it later, I know you would. There’s some money in here, you know. The general went to the bank this morning. You can have it all. All his pension money for the next two months …’

  Bossoni looked wearied by all this nonsense, checked his gun meticulously and walked behind Argyll’s chair. He put the gun to Argyll’s head.

  To say that Argyll was frigh
tened would be to understate the matter. He closed his eyes, and tried to keep the panic under control. He looked at Mary Verney, and was strangely reassured. It was her eyes, measuring, watching and assessing. As she twittered and fluttered – oh, watch out, that might be loaded – she seemed to know exactly what she was doing. Unfortunately, Argyll didn’t, which was why he was not completely relaxed.

  ‘Be quiet,’ Bossoni said.

  ‘Do be careful, young man,’ Mary went on, babbling as ageing ladies who have never experienced danger before are prone to do. ‘Accidents will happen, you know. I remember when my cousin Charles was cleaning his Purdey. Back in 1953 this was. No, I tell a lie, it must have been 1954…’

  ‘Shut up, you stupid old woman,’ Bossoni snapped. But he pulled the gun away from Argyll and pointed it at her to emphasize the importance of silence. Mary Verney let out a short scream of fright, and dropped the briefcase. She flustered and fluttered on the ground to pick it all up again, twittering about losing all the general’s papers. He’s a very important man, you know.

  Bossoni evidently had had enough. He took two steps towards her but, before he could do much more, Mary Verney looked up, took aim very methodically, and shot him three times in the chest with the gun she had taken from Bottando’s briefcase.

  The noise was appalling. So was the effect. The impact of the bullets lifted Bossoni off the ground and hurled him backwards on to Argyll. Who squealed in terror and tried to wriggle out from underneath. The smell was terrible, the sight worse. When Argyll did get free, he scuttled behind the table before peering out. The cicadas were still twittering, the light from the lamps around the terrace still reflected peacefully off the glasses of red wine, and made the thick gathering pools of blood shine in a way that, Argyll thought quite irrelevantly, reminded him of a painting he had once seen. The execution of Saint Catherine on the wheel, Venetian. Very much into strong, bold coloration, the Venetians. Giorgione? Maybe not. He couldn’t remember, and then he remembered it really wasn’t that important at the moment.

  Neither Bottando nor Flavia had moved. They just sat there, watching and saying nothing. There was little enough to say, after all. Things like ‘goodness’ or ‘dear me’ were inadequate for the occasion, and shouting or screaming seemed a little pointless.

  Apart from the body slumped over Argyll’s chair, the pools of blood all over the floor, the smell, and the sight of Mary Verney sitting with the gun in her hand, coolly looking at what she’d done, everything was perfectly normal.

  ‘What have you done?’ Argyll managed to say eventually, after he’d watched her go over, feel the man’s pulse and rummage in his pockets. ‘Where did you get that gun from?’

  ‘This?’ she asked. ‘Oh, it’s Taddeo’s. He forgot to hand it in when he retired. Very careless of him to keep it loaded. Although, in the circumstances, I think we might forgive him this time. Grappa, I think.’

  She was remarkably calm. Frighteningly so. She poured the drinks with a steady hand, while Argyll could scarcely hold his glass, his were trembling so much. It was why, he thought, she made such a good thief and he would have been such a terrible one. He found her more terrifying than Bossoni.

  ‘He was going to kill us, you know,’ she said reassuringly. ‘Don’t think he was just saying that for fun. Or that we might have talked him out of it. Just a question of whether you wanted him dead, or us.’

  ‘Did you have to kill him, though?’

  ‘What did you expect me to do? Shoot the gun out of his hands? My eyesight’s so bad I was lucky to hit him at all. I don’t get a great deal of practice in this sort of thing, you know.’

  ‘But what do we do now?’ Maybe it was something about the shock that made him prone to asking fatuous questions.

  She thought. ‘We have two choices. We either get rid of the body…’

  ‘Or what?’ It was getting worse.

  ‘Or we call the police.’

  ‘What about if he has friends down the road?’

  ‘Then we’re in trouble. I was assuming he was on his own. In fact, he must have been. This has all the signs of a do-it-yourself affair. Hurried, badly planned. This is not the way you go about killing people if you’re professional about it.’

  Argyll shook his head. It was a bit too bizarre for him. There she was, sixty if she was a day, grey hair done up in a bun, gun in hand, talking as though assassinating people was as common as baking a fruit cake.

  ‘I think under the circumstances that calling the police might be unwise just at the moment,’ Bottando said quietly, finally shaking off his shock. ‘It would be best if one or two things were settled first.’

  ‘Such as?’ Argyll said crossly. Was he the only person here going to show any sign of alarm or upset at what had happened? Was he really the only one who regarded a bloodstained body on the terrace as a little out of the ordinary?

  ‘I think we have to make sure there is no repetition,’ he said. ‘Flavia?’

  She nodded, and got up in a dreamy fashion. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Shall we go?’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘To Rome. To sort things out,’ she said. ‘We are going to talk to di Lanna. He’s the only one with enough power to do anything. We will have to get his protection, in effect. I only hope he’ll give it. But if we give him his wife’s murderer he should owe us something. It’s just a pity we can’t give him any proof.’

  ‘Just a moment,’ Argyll said petulantly. ‘What about this?’ He waved his hand in the direction of the body. ‘You can’t just leave him there.’

  Bottando looked thoughtful. ‘No. You’ll have to move it.’

  ‘Me? Why should I move it?’

  ‘You can’t expect Mary to. She’s not strong enough. And you shouldn’t sound so annoyed. If it wasn’t for Mary you’d be dead.’

  ‘And now,’ said Mary Verney, as they watched the lights of Bottando’s car disappear down the track as he and Flavia headed for Rome. ‘Perhaps you’d be so kind as to remove that corpse from my terrace, Jonathan?’

  Argyll, who thought her levity was a little distasteful, scowled at her. ‘No,’ he said. He was beginning to resent being the only normal person left in the world.

  ‘Oh, but you must. You heard the general. I can hardly do it myself, and what if the police should come? Or the grocer? What would they say?’

  ‘I don’t care. I’m not going to move him until you are honest with me. I know it doesn’t come naturally. It will be an effort, but you’ll have to try. Otherwise you’ll be stuck with Signor Bossoni on your terrace for the next week.’

  ‘Very threatening of you. And quite insulting, too. I always try to be honest. Most of the time. What do you want to know, exactly?’

  ‘The money. Where is it?’

  ‘What money?’

  ‘The three million dollars.’

  ‘Oh. That money.’

  ‘That money.’

  She looked at him, hesitated, then let out a deep breath. ‘It’s in Switzerland. I took it there last Monday. It’s in a bank account.’

  ‘Your bank account?’

  ‘Well, yes. Since you ask. It is.’

  Here she stopped, so Argyll prompted her. ‘And how did you get hold of it?’

  ‘If you must be so nosy,’ she said, ‘it’s simple enough. Taddeo told me what he was going to do, and I was worried. So I tagged along in my little car and saw the whole encounter, from Sabbatini arriving to his driving off in his van with the picture still inside it. And saw Taddeo hopping up and down in the layby looking furious. I followed, at a discreet distance, until Sabbatini stopped at a petrol station. Have you ever noticed that when the excitement fades all you are left with is a profound need to go to the toilet?’

  Argyll said that his life was blessedly free of excitement, most of the time. Although now she mentioned it …

  He disappeared into the house for a few moments, and then came back. ‘You were saying?’ he said, as Mary showed no signs of volunteering information with
out constant prodding.

  ‘Well, that’s how it was with Sabbatini. He ran for the toilet as fast as his legs would carry him, and while he was there, I stole his van.’

  She smiled. Argyll scowled. ‘Just like that?’ he said.

  ‘Pretty much. I mean, he’d taken the keys out, but it was an old van and that was no great trouble. So there we are. Simple, really.’

  ‘And then you hoodwinked the general into thinking …’

  ‘Good heavens, no.’

  Argyll looked at her for a few moments as it all sank in. ‘No?’ he said. ‘You mean that he knew all about this? He decided to take the money? After all this time he’s become a criminal?’

  Mary Verney looked puzzled. ‘Don’t be silly,’ she said. ‘It’s a great embarrassment to both of us. Who wants three million dollars? Do you have any idea how difficult it is to manage that amount of dirty money?’

  Argyll said he hadn’t.

  ‘It’s no easy business. I have quite enough, thank you very much, and Taddeo’s tastes are terribly modest when he’s not in a restaurant. No. We kept the money as we didn’t know what else to do. Sabbatini had been killed, the secret services had gone through his apartment. Taddeo knew this had to be something to do with the di Lanna business and simply did not want to get involved. Can you blame him, considering what’s been going on here? If he’d suddenly turned up with the picture, then he would have had to explain how he got it. Much better to convince everyone it was all to do with money by inventing some non-existent collaborator for Sabbatini and keep it all as distant as possible. At least, that seemed the best idea at the time.’

  ‘You could have told Flavia.’

  ‘She would have been obliged to do something. He did his best to keep her out of it and tried to get her to leave well alone. If she’d done as she was told and forgotten about it – as the general told her to, the prime minister told her to, di Lanna told her to and, I imagine, you told her to as well – then all would have been well. As it is, we now have a mess on our hands.’