Chapter Fourteen

BACK IN HIS CELL Morris assembled his helpers again and asked them if perhaps he was being set up. Could the note be some sophisticated Italian trick to encourage him to confess by getting him excited about mitigating circumstances?

Lying on his side as he waited for a response, he flicked through page after page of his sketchbook: there were Kwame and Paola embracing, one big black hand on one even bigger breast. There was Bobo looking up from his open desk drawer, his fingers pulling out a blackmail letter Morris had mailed years before. There was Forbes beside his easel, paintbrush hovering over the defenestrated Jezebel. Finally someone spoke.

‘That magistrate, what’s her name?’ It was Paola’s voice.

‘Grimaldi.’ Morris turned and lay on his back, holding the notebook in the air.

‘Right. She didn’t tell you the others had already confessed, did she?’

‘What others?’

‘The Arab bitch,’ Massimina said in a bored voice.

‘But . . .’

‘That would be the usual trick, wouldn’t it? They say your accomplices have confessed so you cave in and tell the truth.’

‘But I didn’t do it!’ Morris frowned. He hesitated. ‘Were Samira and Tarik involved? Is there something you know?’

Again there was silence.

‘Go over the whole weekend again,’ Paola said coolly.

‘Do I have to?’ Morris protested.

The dead waited. Morris sighed.

‘So, Saturday morning there was the nth argument with Massimina. I objected to her locking herself in her bedroom all day, said she should be helping her mother who was trying to put the winter clothes in mothballs and bring out the summer stuff. She slammed the door in my face and said if I kept bothering her she knew things about me she could tell her mother.’

‘Nice,’ Kwame said.

‘Why do you think I always preferred to live alone?’ Forbes asked.

‘I then spent some time in The Art Room, moving around the paintings on the virtual exhibition I’ve set up on the Mac. The real problem is to get the balance between an intellectual or thematic arrangement and an aesthetic organisation that suits the space and the light. For example, to my mind the Gentileschi Holofernes would go well with any of the Poussins, but they’re not thematically linked.’

This interesting reflection was met with complete silence.

‘Tell us about the afternoon,’ Forbes said.

‘Had lunch around one or one-thirty, I suppose, I mean, that’s when I always have lunch on Saturday.’

Morris Duckworth’s legal team waited.

‘Then a snooze with Antonella. She’s been having trouble with her knee recently and—’

‘Morris!’ Paola snapped. ‘Get to the point! Around five o’clock you set off to see your dusky little whore.’

‘First I dropped in at Trevisan Wines to make sure there would be a van available for the following morning. To pick up San Bartolomeo. I also took a little time to read Mauro’s report on ways to speed things up at the old Quinzano bottle factory. I was honestly surprised how practical and clear-sighted it was, especially the bit about allowing the Moslem workers—’

‘Morris, for Christ’s sake!’ Forbes objected.

‘It isn’t enough to kill us,’ Paola observed drily, ‘now he has to bore us to death.’

‘OK, so then I went to see Samira.’

There was a brief silence.

‘Was she expecting you?’

‘No.’

‘So why did you go? Or why didn’t you call ahead?’ It was Paola conducting the interrogation.

‘I like to surprise her.’

‘You like to act the boss. You like to check up on her. It’s sick.’

‘The truth is,’ Morris conceded, ‘I wanted to find out exactly what their relationship with Volpi was. I was uncomfortable about him knowing them so well. I hate it when people I know know each other.’

Silence. It was strange, Morris thought, how the dead questioned him in little flurries, then backed off, as if there were somewhere he wasn’t supposed to go.

‘Anyway, I rang and they buzzed me up at once.’

‘Without asking who it was?’

Morris hadn’t thought of this. ‘Right. You’re right. As if they were expecting me. Though they weren’t, because then they were surprised.’

‘Tell the truth, Morris.’

‘They were both naked.’

‘Ah.’ The narrow prison cell was alive with sighs.

‘Tarik answered naked?’

‘Starkers.’

‘And you didn’t wonder who they might have been expecting if not you?’

‘They were high. Maybe they weren’t expecting anyone. No one else arrived.’

‘High on what?’

‘They offered me a smoke.’

‘Hadn’t you said you never would again?’ Mimi asked.

‘The flesh is weak,’ Morris acknowledged.

‘The spirit is non-existent,’ Paola added.

‘Perhaps they sent a text message warning whoever it was not to come,’ Bobo suggested. ‘Do you remember them texting?’

‘I can’t recall.’

‘Boss,’ Kwame chirped in cheerfully, ‘why not just describe the whole thing and we’ll sit back and listen.’

Morris sighed deeply. He didn’t want to, but sooner or later he would have to go over this. Eyes closed on the narrow bunk he began to tell the story out loud in a muttered monotone. So . . . when he had arrived he had seen at once that the apartment was not in its usual state. All the windows were wide open. It had been the first warm spring evening. Mild air was drifting into the smoky room. The bright cushions Samira liked to keep on bed and sofa were scattered over the living-room floor together with discarded clothes, yoga mats, bowls, plates, glasses and playing cards. A half-eaten cake had been on the table. There were glasses and bottles. Music was playing on YouTube. Modern Arab music, jingly, festive and repetitive. There was a laptop on a chair. Arab babes dancing in jeans and jowly youngsters smarming round the mike. Tarik, usually so sullen and reserved, had burst out laughing when Morris appeared at the door. ‘Welcome to Nineveh, Meester Duckworth,’ he had shouted. ‘Wanna play Sardanapalus?’

‘Oh Morrees,’ Mimi shook her head.

‘Makes me life-sick,’ Paola muttered.

‘And I just thought, well, the hell with it!’ Morris told them.

‘Damn right,’ Kwame agreed.

‘Snoozes with Antonella had that effect on me too,’ Bobo acknowledged.

Anyway, he had asked the two of them what all the celebration was about.

‘We got good news!’ Samira had laughed.

‘From Libya,’ Tarik added quickly.

Their favourite uncle’s faction had prevailed, it seemed, in some complex negotiation in Benghazi.

‘And for that they had to get naked?’ Giacomo enquired.

Morris remembered feeling at the time that the story had sounded rather improvised: something about a feud in the souk between different suppliers of essential commodities. They had been laughing throughout. Meantime, he had found himself in his underwear on an orange cushion, sucking on a fat joint, something he always promised himself he would never do again.

‘What were you thinking of?’ Mimi demanded. ‘What if they’re drug dealers or something? What if this whole Libyan thing is about trafficking? Here in Italy.’

‘Arms,’ Bobo suggested.

‘Paintings,’ Forbes thought.

‘Prostitutes,’ Paola volunteered.

It was Morris’s turn to be silent. Eventually, he muttered, ‘From the moment Stan went to the police, I’d felt I was living on borrowed time. Then that evening there was spring in the air, and Samira looked so good.’

‘Liar,’ Paola said. ‘You’d seen her naked a thousand times.’

On his back on the bunk, Morris’s forehead knitted into a painful frown.

‘It was the boy.’

There was a sharp intake of breath.

‘It was the first time you’d seen Tarik naked.’

‘That’s true,’ Morris acknowledged. ‘Usually he was rather unfriendly. Surly. And instead, all of a sudden . . . It was new to me. I don’t know.’ He hesitated. ‘Having chosen not to kill Stan, I’d been feeling rather virtuous. Like I deserved a treat.’

‘Chosen?’

His friends didn’t seem impressed.

‘It was only the low ceiling,’ Bobo said drily.

‘Is the Arab well hung?’ Forbes enquired.

‘Oh for heaven’s sake!’ Mimi wailed.

Then, pulling a blanket over his face, one arm underneath lolling indigently across his belly, Morris told his seven old friends in unsparing detail how it had all happened. The moment when, eyes closed, he had realised that the lips kissing his possessed an unusual beardy roughness; the moment in the shower kneeling between the two young bodies as the water streamed off them, and then the beautiful moment, dancing together, shoulders closed in a circle, hands on buttocks, to the languid wail of some Arab compilation. Marijuana and sandalwood in the air. Until, a couple of hours later, or perhaps longer, all memories abruptly ceased.

‘Wow!’ someone breathed.

‘Morris dancing!’ Sandra giggled.

‘Well I’ll be buggered,’ Forbes remarked with fruity indulgence.

Then the frivolity faded and there was a long silence in the tiny cell. It was rather like at the end of the Communion service back in St Barnabas when everyone had partaken of the body and blood and knelt in their pews to reflect.

Finally Paola said softly: ‘Dear Mo, sometimes it feels like you’ve had to do the living for all of us.’

Morris accepted this interpretation. Then remarked, ‘But it’s hardly going to help with my defence.’

There was a general shuffling, a certain embarrassment even.

‘Well,’ Sandra said thoughtfully. ‘Now you’ve had the good grace to tell us what really happened that evening, let me ask this: have you ever heard of TGA?’

‘TG what?’ Morris sat up.

‘Temporary global amnesia,’ the English girl said. ‘I read about it in some magazine. There was a famous case. In America, of course. It happens to people in their fifties; you get about six to twenty-four hours of total amnesia. It’s triggered by some mind-blowing experience. Often sexual.’

Morris was very alert now. And yes, dimly, distantly, he recalled that he too had read about this. It rang a bell.

‘So, I have wild sex and lose my memory for a few hours, is that it? Right when the murder happens.’

‘I only read the article,’ Sandra said. ‘I’m not an expert.’

‘But what would it mean?’ Morris asked. ‘That I could have done things I don’t know about?’

‘I’ve no idea. You’ll have to do some research. Get on the net.’

Which of course was impossible in a prison cell. The problem was that Morris needed to know now. Otherwise, how could he ever put together an alibi?

‘Perhaps there are clues in what happened the following morning,’ Bobo suggested.

‘In what sense?’

‘When you went to get the picture, did Samira and Tarik give some hint about what happened the evening before?’

Morris wasn’t sure. He would have noticed.

‘You didn’t know the old fat boy had been skewered at that point, Boss,’ Kwame pointed out. ‘You weren’t looking for hints.’

‘Go over it again,’ Paola told him.

‘But it was exactly as in my report to Carla.’

‘Not altogether,’ Mimi said severely.

‘OK. Early morning Antonella woke me in The Art Room and asked me when I’d got home. That’s when I realised I couldn’t remember anything.’

‘And did you tell your wife?’

‘Of course not! I felt confused, and rather guilty too, for what had happened the previous afternoon.’

‘What a useless hypocrite you are,’ Paola said with an intensity of contempt that Morris found both humbling and exciting.

‘Then we went to church, only to find that Don Lorenzo wasn’t—’

‘Could he be involved?’

‘Who?’

‘The priest.’

It was Sandra again. Morris was rather surprised at the extent of her participation.

‘After all, why was he out in the middle of the night, and why did he have a heart attack when he got home?’

‘Because he was visiting a deathbed,’ Morris said.

‘Yeah, Volpi’s!’ Sandra insisted.

‘Hardly a deathbed,’ Kwame quipped.

‘He’s a strange priest if you ask me,’ Sandra said. ‘How did they get your boy Mauro out of gaol in the end, Morris? Whose coffin was it fell on his foot that he never wants to confess?’

Morris felt lost.

‘I was molested by a priest,’ Sandra said. ‘I was only twelve. It was after choir practice in—’

‘For Christ’s sake, Sandy,’ Giacomo interrupted.

‘Anto hurried to the hospital,’ Morris resumed, ‘while I set off to San Zeno again.’

‘And . . . ?’ Paola took over the questioning.

And Morris had had to ring the bell two or three times before he was buzzed in. They were barely out of bed.

‘No mention of the previous evening’s antics?’

‘Not at all. Or not at first.’

Over breakfast—Morris had brought the Libyans cappuccinos and pastries from the café in the piazza—Samira had rather unexpectedly said something about their relationship being at a crossroads. Either he, Morris, was man enough to leave home and make an honest woman of her, or they had to stop seeing each other. It was too painful for her to get any deeper in a relationship if it was just going to end.

‘An honest woman,’ Mimi objected. ‘That’s rich.’

‘Obviously I have no intention of leaving home,’ Morris reassured his seven servers. He had always understood that the Duckworth ghosts were profoundly conservative.

‘Anyway, enough of my relationship with Samira, since it’s got nothing at all to do with Volpi’s murder.’

‘It might have a lot to do with it,’ Bobo said, ‘and it certainly will have a lot to do with how those two kids responded when the police questioned them.’

‘For example,’ Paola resumed, ‘what you didn’t tell Carla in your statement was that at the church in San Briccio they weren’t just making fun of the paintings, they were making fun of you.’

Morris said nothing.

‘Of your sexual prowess to be precise,’ Paola said. ‘Or lack thereof.’

‘Of how you struggled,’ Mimi said quietly.

‘Did not your dusky damsel say,’ Forbes chuckled, ‘and I quote: “I thought Methuselah was going to blow a gasket”?’

Morris tried to be patient. ‘I just don’t see what this has got to do with Volpi’s death.’

‘Why didn’t you tell the two of them you couldn’t remember anything?’ Paola enquired. ‘It might have been a more honest way to deal with the situation. Look guys, what on earth happened to me yesterday evening? I can’t remember. Maybe they’d have told you. Maybe you’d have an alibi now. Or at least you’d know you did it.’

He hadn’t asked because he had felt insecure, Morris confessed, anxious that he would come across as incipient Alzheimer’s. Anxious that he was Alzheimer’s maybe. After all, he’d already fainted once and forgotten an hour or so. ‘Anyway, whatever I did when I wasn’t remembering, it clearly wasn’t anything with them or they would have referred to it, wouldn’t they?’

‘So, your position,’ Paola summed up, ‘is that if you killed Volpi when you weren’t remembering anything, you didn’t do it with the Arabs, or things would have been different Sunday morning, because surely they would have referred to it.’

‘Right!’ Morris said.

‘So if they did it,’ Paola went on, ‘they did it in your absence.’

‘Right,’ Morris agreed again.

‘Unless of course they knew that you were in a special state and wouldn’t remember anything.’

‘Hard to imagine,’ Morris shook his head. ‘But surely it’s far more likely that someone quite different did it, someone I know nothing about and who has nothing to do with Sammie and Tarik.’

Silence.

‘I mean, about this famous mise en scène, the Eglon cameo, supposedly so damning, in that I had just purchased the woodcut and so on.’

‘Yes?’

Morris hesitated: ‘Well, I may have been a warm advocate of using the image in the show, but I certainly never did any of that unhealthy stuff when I killed in the past, did I? I mean, I just killed because I had to and got out fast. Without arcane messages or perverse theatricals.’

There was an awkward pause.

‘So a murder like this would be a major departure for me, wouldn’t it? I mean, in a way, it would have been something to be proud of. I almost wish I had done it. But given my performance with Stan, it hardly seems likely that . . .’

More silence.

Finally, in a very low voice, Mimi said, ‘I wish you’d shown a bit more respect with me, Morris. Stuffing me in bin bags. With my bottom hanging out as well.’

‘In the boot of a car,’ Bobo reminded him.

‘Under rubble,’ Forbes protested.

‘Sent up in flames,’ Kwame sighed.

‘OK, I was rushed, but I mean, precisely because of that I didn’t go for the big symbolic display, did I? That’s just not me. Not my signature. I only kill because I have to then I get out fast.’

‘You’ve changed a lot over the years,’ Paola pointed out. ‘You’ve acquired this art obsession.’

‘And you were high on dope and group sex,’ Mimi added.

‘Unfortunately, Morris,’ Bobo observed caustically, ‘the police don’t know you have a record as a different kind of killer, do they? I mean, Grimaldi’s not going to say, Ah, no, this can’t be Morris Duckworth; when our honorary citizen kills he just bashes his victim over the head, bundles the body into any filthy hole he can find and gets the hell out.’

There was some tittering.

Morris felt exasperated, and exhausted. In a way it was exciting, but there was only so much you could take. He yawned. His legal team chattered on. They were discussing the chances of uncovering seamy aspects of Volpi’s life. ‘He didn’t end up nude in the museum basement by accident.’ Morris was too drowsy to keep track. They wondered what Zolla’s alibi might be. They worried whether the Arabs would tell the police about the intimate nature of their relationship with Morris, or whether Morris was right to assume their omertà over this point. Had Morris considered the idea that they might not be brother and sister? What if they were members of the Libyan secret services? And being Neapolitan, was Volpi perhaps a camorrista? What if the police did now finally make connections to the disappearance of Forbes? Bobo complained what a shame it was the dead didn’t have access to the net to check up on the causes and consequences of temporary amnesia. Was it something that regularly happened to killers? Was this fainting habit Morris appeared to have a blood-pressure problem? The last thing Morris heard before falling into a deep sleep was Kwame’s voice offering the common-sense reflection that in the end it hardly mattered who had actually killed Volpi; their only concern should be to concoct a credible alibi that shifted the suspicion on to someone else’s shoulders. ‘Pass the buck, Boss. Pass the buck.’