Season of Storms (38 page)

xxi

ALEX
came to see me in my dressing-room, an hour before curtain up.

I wasn’t in costume yet, and had only just begun to do my make-up. I turned from the mirror to greet him, then looked round. “Where are the dogs?”

“In the kennels. They’re nervous of crowds.”

“I see. So the audience is starting to arrive?”

“A couple of the coaches are here, yes. It’s going to be a full house.”

At least, I thought, the weather had held fair and warm for those who would be sitting on the grass. Perhaps the rain, the storms, had finished for the season. “Come in and have a seat.”

“No, that’s all right. I’m sure you’re very busy—I don’t want to get in your way.” But that said, he didn’t move from the doorway. He only seemed to plant himself more firmly there, his gaze focussed rather intently on a point just past my shoulder. Having watched him all these weeks now I recognized this posture as the one that he assumed when he was wanting to communicate but didn’t have the words to hand.

Turning, I went back to putting on my make-up, glancing at Alex in the mirror’s reflection. “Did Den manage to find you? He wants you to make the announcement before we go on, about Rupert . . .”

“Yes,” he said, shortly. And then, in a more normal voice, “I’d be honoured to do it.” The thought seemed to trigger another. The brief look he sent me was quietly cautious, as though he were probing a wound and wasn’t sure at what point he might cause me pain. “About the cremation . . . they said they could do it tomorrow, at ten. Would that suit you?”

“Yes. I’ll have to check with Bryan, but I’m sure it will be fine. Thanks.”

“Are you sure that you don’t want some kind of memorial service? We do have a chapel right here at the house, and—”

I shook my head, cutting him off. “Roo hated things like that. He always said that when he died he didn’t want to have a funeral, only to be cremated and have his ashes scattered round the garden. Bryan will probably ask a few of their friends round to the flat for an informal wake, when he goes home.”

“He’s leaving soon, I take it?”

“Wednesday, I think he said.”

“But you’re staying here?”

My head came up. I met his eyes, perplexed. “Of course.”

“It’s only that you said you weren’t quite sure, last night.”

“Oh. Well, I was rather out of it last night. I don’t remember half of what I said.”

“I see.”

It was his tone of voice as much as anything that caught me. “Is something wrong?”

It occurred to me that his behaviour went beyond his usual reserve, beyond his trying to be sensitive to Rupert’s death, not wanting to upset me. He had actually withdrawn again; grown distant.

I could see it in his eyes as they found mine in the reflection. “No, of course not. I realize you were under quite a bit of stress last night—I’m sure you said some things you didn’t mean, and I won’t hold you to them. I should hope I’m gentleman enough to stand aside.”

I shook my head as though the act might clear it. “Stand aside for whom?”

“For Den, of course.”

I sighed. “But I’ve told you . . .”

“Yes, I know. You’ve told me several times, but I’m afraid it’s just not on. I came back earlier today than I’d expected, you see, and Teresa told me Den had been wanting to speak with me, so I came here looking for him . . .”

“Oh, Alex.”

“It’s all right, really. Only don’t try to tell me there’s nothing between you, because I saw the way that you were holding him, and it wasn’t exactly a friendly embrace. I’m not a fool.”

“You are, you know,” I told him, rather fondly.

“What?”

“You’re right about one thing—we are more than friends, Den and I.” And I told him the whole of it, gathering confidence as I went, watching his face change as his stoicism gave way first to amazement and then, rather wonderfully I thought, to something that bordered on open relief.

“Your father . . .” He half-smiled, and studied my face in the mirror. “There is a resemblance, you know, once you look for it.”

I nodded. “Your grandmother saw it.”

“That doesn’t surprise me.” Still looking a little off balance, he drew a chair up to the side of my dressing-table and sat. The distance had vanished from his eyes and he was back to being Alex now, the man who’d held me close last night, who’d kissed my face and whispered . . .

“How’s your head?” He reached his hand as Den had done and felt the lump, to check it.

“Getting better.”

“If it helps, I’ve been told the police had to bash Pietro around a bit when they arrested him. He didn’t exactly cooperate.”

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.”