Deep and Silent Waters (41 page)

Niccolo’s face turned ashen as he listened, watching his mother with pity. ‘They all betrayed you, even your own brother.’

‘Carlo didn’t know about Gina. He thought it was an old-fashioned arranged marriage and he didn’t see what was wrong with that. He was an old-fashioned man and, anyway, he knew I loved your father, and if he suspected that Domenico didn’t love me, well, Carlo didn’t think that mattered, so long as I became a lady, one of the aristocracy, the mistress of a house like this. Don’t forget, our family was in trade – the upper class in Milan looked down on us even when they invited us to their parties because we were so rich. But once I was the Contessa d’Angeli I was in another bracket. It was our father’s dream come true.’

‘You brought money to the marriage and Papa brought class,’ Niccolo muttered. ‘A typical tradesman’s bargain.’

‘But your father wasn’t prepared to marry me until he was sure I had the factory and the money. Only when Carlo was dead did he set a date for our wedding, and all that time he was living with Gina in America.’

Her son and Sebastian both stared fixedly at her.

She nodded, her mouth a thin line. ‘I only found out after my honeymoon when I got back here and found her in the house. Domenico said she was his housekeeper, but Antonio told me the truth. He owed his loyalty to me, not to your father. I brought him here from Milan. He and I had been through so much together – it was Antonio who helped me take care of my brother during his last, terrible illness. I needed Antonio then, I needed him even more, later, after my marriage. Without Antonio’s support I couldn’t have gone on living under this roof, knowing that my husband loved his mistress, not me.’

‘God, Mamma, why didn’t you throw her out the minute you knew?’

‘Domenico wouldn’t let me.’

‘Don’t be ridiculous, Mamma! You were his wife. You had every right to dismiss a servant.’

She laughed harshly. ‘In theory, yes, but with my husband on her side, what could I do? Oh, I threatened to sack her, but he said if I told her to go they would both leave. I would be shamed in front of all Venice. A laughing-stock. The new bride deserted for the daughter of a grocer! The whole of Venice already knew, of course. They were waiting, watching, to see how I would deal with it – and all I could think of doing was to pretend I had no idea, play deaf at parties, ignore the whispers, the secret mockery, the smiles and gleeful eyes. How do you think I felt?’

‘I don’t know how you could bear it, Mamma,’ Niccolo said.

‘It was like wearing a hair vest. At first it chafed and was agonising, but in the end it became almost an obsession. When I discovered the mechanism in the floor that let me watch them, I couldn’t stop myself doing so every night. In the summer, they slept naked without a cover, and I could see … everything … everything they did. I don’t think Domenico knew about the eye in the ceiling, or else he had forgotten it. He came up here only rarely. He hated sharing my bed. He only did it in the hope of getting a child. They never seemed to sense they were being watched. I could listen to what they were saying, find out their plans, hear just what they thought of me, watch them caressing, kissing, doing it …’

‘Stop it, Mamma! That’s enough! I don’t want to hear!’

She ignored him. ‘I prayed I would become pregnant, because I hoped that if I had his child Domenico might turn to me at last, but then she was pregnant. I was bewildered when she suddenly married the gardener. I couldn’t guess at first why she did it. After all, it was Gina who really ran this house. Gina was the hostess at dinner parties, garden parties, lunch. She wore fabulous, expensive clothes he bought for her. With my money! Not to mention the jewels! I was left in the background, and Venice pretended politely that I didn’t exist. When she married, Domenico gave them an apartment in the palazzo, but she went on sleeping with him, not her husband, and that was when I knew she was pregnant. She was about four months gone and I saw her walking about naked in the bedroom down there. Her swelling belly was obvious. I nearly went out of my mind with jealousy and rage. I broke some valuable glass in here – it was all over the floor, great jagged splinters of it. I felt they had gone into my head, into my heart.’

Niccolo put an arm round her plump shoulders, said awkwardly, ‘Mamma, poor Mamma, it must have been so terrible.’

She leant on him and sighed. ‘You can’t imagine! And then a month after I found out she was pregnant, I discovered I was going to have a child, too. I hoped I’d get Domenico back, but it was too late. Her son was born first and it was him Domenico loved, never you.’

‘That isn’t true!’ Niccolo’s arm dropped and he moved away from her. ‘Papa loved me! I know he did!’

‘Not the way he loved her son!’ She shot a bitter look in Sebastian’s direction.

He had listened in silence, his face grim.

The Contessa spat out, ‘He hated knowing that his first-born was known as another man’s child, was thought of as a gardener’s son, a peasant. He brooded on it all the time. Then one day he told me he was going to adopt Sebastian, change his will, leave everything equally divided between the two of you.’

Sebastian drew a harsh breath.

‘I couldn’t let that happen,’ the Contessa ground out. ‘He wasn’t taking
my
money to give to Gina’s child! He told me if I tried to stop him he would turn me out of Ca’ d’Angeli, said he would get a papal annulment. He had a dozen highly placed relatives in the Church who would help him get one, on some trumped-up reason. Then he would marry her and make their son legitimate.’ She looked pleadingly at her own son. ‘I couldn’t let him do that to you. You see that, don’t you?’

‘So you killed them,’ Sebastian said.

Niccolo’s head swung towards him. ‘
What?
’

‘My mother and our father – don’t you see? She killed them. I don’t know how she did it, but I’ve suspected for a long time that their deaths weren’t an accident. My assistant went through the newspaper files, talked to the police and was certain their deaths were never seriously investigated. And I met an old man in Venice one day, last August, who recognised me from when I was a child. He told me he had worked at Ca’ d’Angeli at the time my father died, and all the servants believed it wasn’t an accident. They were all sure it was murder.’

‘Servants’ gossip,’ said the Contessa. ‘You can’t take notice of what they say.’

‘You just said that Antonio always knew what was going on!’

She changed tack. ‘I was here all the time – you know that, you saw me yourself. You were outside, you looked up at me, at the window.’

‘You may not have done it yourself, but you planned their deaths. You paid someone to kill them.’

She laughed hoarsely, her face ugly now. ‘Prove it! Go on, find some proof. You try. It’s too many years ago. There were no witnesses then, there are no witnesses now. You can’t prove anything.’

For the last few minutes Niccolo had been silent, his eyes fixed on his mother’s face. Now he said, very quietly, ‘Did you kill my father, Mamma?’

Her dark eyes flicked to him warily. ‘Don’t take any notice of
him
. He hates me, hates us both. He’d say anything to hurt us. Ignore him. We should never have had him in this house, I told you that, but you would invite him, and see what has happened! He’s a jinx. His wife jumped out of a window, then that woman he called his secretary but who was his mistress once, she jumped out of the window upstairs. Don’t you think that’s a strange coincidence? Two women dying in the same way? He’s the murderer, not me!’

Niccolo leant on the back of a red-velvet-covered armchair. ‘You were here that day, Mamma, but Antonio wasn’t. He was out doing the marketing. In the old launch. You see, I remember that whole day very clearly.’

‘Niccolo, don’t let him come between us! He’s his mother’s child! She was the same – she came between me and your father and—’

He interrupted her. ‘I loved my father, his death was the worst thing that ever happened to me. I found the old launch, years ago, in the boat-house. The side was stove in, dented and scratched, as if it had hit something very hard. It hadn’t been used for years, but I remembered Antonio setting out in it that day to go to market. I had watched him leave and then, half an hour later, I watched Papa and Gina go.’

‘No, Niccolo, Antonio had had an accident a week before. The boat was waiting to be mended when your father was killed. He wasn’t using it that week. He did the marketing on foot. It’s all in the police records – check them!’

‘I don’t believe you. You had my father murdered.’ Niccolo’s face had turned bone white.

‘No!’ She clung to his arm, desperation in her eyes. ‘Niccolo, think what they did to me – what they were going to do to you! They both deserved to die.’

He pushed down her hands and stepped away, face cold. ‘No. If you had left him, forced an annulment on
him
, I could understand that. He deserved it. But murder? That’s something else. I don’t want you under my roof any more, Mamma. Or Antonio. You can both leave tomorrow. You can find yourself a nice villa by the sea, but stay away from Venice in future. I never want to see you again.’

The Contessa staggered as if she might fall, tried to grab hold of her son but he took another step away.

‘Niccolo …’ She held out a hand. ‘You can’t do this to me! You can’t turn me out of my home after all these years!’

‘You’re a murderer. What I should do is call the police, but I won’t, because I don’t want all the trouble it would cause. But I can’t go on sharing a house with my father’s killer. I’d never feel safe again.’

Her voice rose almost to a shriek. ‘I won’t go! You can’t make me!’

‘I can, and I will.’

They stared at each other, oddly alike in that long moment: obstinacy and tenacity in both faces.

Sebastian turned and began to walk to the door. The Contessa screamed after him, ‘You’re to blame for all this – you and that bitch you brought under my roof, that whore, your whore, with her red hair and those sly eyes. I know what you see in her – she’s the image of your mother, that slut Gina. Do you know she’s been at it with my son? I’ve seen them, watched them, seen Niccolo touching her, naked, his hands all over her—’

Sebastian left the room and shut the door. Laura was leaning on the wall outside, her face wet with tears. He picked her up and carried her down to her room, under the curious eyes of the film crew. There, he put her into the bed and sat down beside her, still holding her.

‘Poor woman,’ she whispered, her arms round his neck. ‘Oh, Sebastian, that poor woman.’

‘The Contessa?’ His face was flinty, closed to all pity. ‘Laura, she’s a murderess! She killed my mother and father. Don’t waste your sympathy on her. You heard what she just said about you, all that sick stuff about you and Niccolo! Or was it true? Was it, Laura?’

‘Don’t!’ She shuddered. ‘You don’t really believe I’ve slept with him?’

‘I believe he’d like you to! I’ve seen the way he looks at you, and I believe he has touched you, at least, even if he’s never got you into bed. Don’t try to tell me he doesn’t fancy you.’

‘Maybe he does – but I’ve never slept with him, or come anywhere near it! And as for his mother, it must be terrible to be so unhappy. Can you even imagine what it must have been like for her? To be in love with her husband and find out he was only pretending to love her too? To have to watch him with another woman?’ Laura grimaced. ‘My skin crept when she was talking about that. And she loves her son very much. It’s obvious she’s devoted her life to him. He won’t really throw her out of her home, will he?’

Sebastian’s face was sombre. ‘Can he ever trust her again? What if he married and brought home a wife to take his mother’s place in Ca’ d’Angeli? How long before she had a fatal accident, Laura?’

‘I hadn’t thought of that. She wouldn’t dare risk it, though, now he knows the truth. Would she?’

‘Would you bet on that?’

She didn’t answer. No, she wouldn’t like to risk a bet on it.

Sebastian stroked her hair, her closed eyes, her cheek. ‘You’re very pale. You ought to sleep for a while. Don’t talk any more, don’t even try to think. Where are your pills? The sedatives the doctor gave you?’

He found them for her and gave her two with a glass of water, lay next to her, caressing her until she fell into a doze. Then he slipped away quietly and went down to talk to Sidney, to look at the pink sheets of the schedule for the next day. He kept an eye on the stairs, watching for the Contessa, and another eye on the door into the part of the palazzo where Laura slept. Just before sunset he went back to check on her and found her staring drowsily at nothing, between sleeping and waking.

‘How do you feel now, my love?’ He bent to kiss her face and at that second they both heard a sound, a sharp crack, from outside the window. Gulls flew up, screeching, their white wings crimson in the setting sun.

‘What was that?’ Laura sat up.

‘Sounded like a shot!’ Sebastian ran to the window and looked out.

Laura got out of bed and joined him. What now? she thought desperately. ‘Maybe it was a motor-boat backfiring?’ she said.

A black gondola with gold stripes along the side was moving away from the landing-stage outside Ca’ d’Angeli. It was being poled by Antonio in his black suit.

There was no sign of anything else nearby. Laura sighed with relief. ‘Where’s he going to, I wonder?’ she asked Sebastian who didn’t answer.

A moment later, Niccolo ran out of the house and shouted after the gondola. ‘What was that noise? Where are you going at this hour, Antonio?’

The Contessa sat under the hood of the gondola, her body slumped sideways, head leaning against the side, a few strands of hair blowing in the wintry wind.

‘She’s sitting in an odd way,’ Sebastian said, opening the window to see better.

‘Antonio, come back here!’ shouted Niccolo. ‘Mamma! What are you up to?’

There was no answer from her nor did Antonio look round or register that he had heard Niccolo. He stood in the gondola, poling strongly out into the Grand Canal. There were almost no other vessels in sight, just a
vaporetto
chugging in the distance, heading towards St Mark’s Square.