Saturday 29 September
Francis lay in bed for quite a while the next morning. The sun was bright on the curtains but he wasn’t inclined to move. He didn’t have to – his first teaching week was formally over. This Saturday had originally been scheduled blank. A day for some people to go home and for others to arrive. For those who were booked for the second week, it was, as Stephanie had put it in the first briefing, in her airy, upbeat way, a day ‘to relax, to read, to think, to paint, to walk, to wonder’. She was right about that last: there was plenty of wondering going on now.
Francis had ended up drinking too much red wine, and then when the older ones had gone to bed, he and Liam and Sasha had repaired to drink grappa on the sofa in the side room. ‘I’m not saying you got me one hundred per cent right,’ Liam was telling the young American, ‘but there were some pretty intriguing insights there, given that I hardly know you. Actually, I really don’t understand how you did that. I’m quite respectful of your talent, if it is a talent, you witch.’ He cackled with laughter. ‘As for Diana …’
Sasha had reduced Diana to silence; almost, it seemed, to tears. The small group left around her at the long dining table had watched in quiet amazement as that confident, challenge-all, Sphinx-like exterior had crumpled in the face of Sasha’s apparently innocent analysis. Sasha was so young and breezy, you had to think it was innocent; but maybe, Francis thought, she was a darker spirit than he’d at first judged under that bright, kooky manner.
She had started by telling Diana that she was a very passionate woman. That had gone down well. ‘I am a passionate woman,’ Diana acknowledged. ‘I’m glad someone’s noticed. I’m also – I hope – a kind and friendly woman.’
‘I’m glad someone’s noticed that,’ Liam chipped in.
Diana’s life, Sasha had continued, had held two significant relationships which had absorbed that passion. The first had been a close family relationship, a father perhaps, or a brother. The second had been an adult love, a husband or a long-term boyfriend. With these two comments you could see Diana, initially sceptical, engage. Like most of the others in the party by now, Francis knew about the adult love, but not about the significant family relationship, if there had been one.
Both relationships had gone badly, Sasha said bluntly. The first had always been bad, the second had started out well but had ended in some sort of betrayal. ‘A betrayal you took very harshly.’
Diana’s face was now a picture: of a woman who was sufficiently self-obsessed to want to know more from this seer but didn’t necessarily want her life laid out bare in public.
Francis noticed her wine glass was empty. He leaned over and refilled it with the red she had been drinking.
‘Thank you,’ she said, throwing him a grateful glance. She took an uncharacteristically big gulp, then fronted up to Sasha again.
‘Go on,’ she said, nodding.
‘Do you want me to? I feel as if I might be intruding.’
‘I’m interested in your take,’ Diana said. ‘On things you have no reason to know anything about. And like Liam, I’m certainly not going to reveal, in any case, whether there is one iota of truth in what you’re saying.’
‘OK,’ Sasha replied. ‘What I do see, though, in both these relationships you’ve had, is a very strong positive energy coming from you. It’s like you’re not the kind of person who lets things get in your way. You try and make things work, whatever. Am I right?’
‘You are right,’ said Diana. ‘I see that as a good thing.’
‘And so, when someone lets you down, you feel it much more powerfully, like, personally maybe. You’re like, I’m not having that.’
‘No.’
‘So you fight it. And if and when you fail to win, you get angry. Very angry, in fact.’
Diana shrugged and smiled thinly. ‘Carry on.’
‘You don’t let go. You try to change things. But if you fail, you don’t forget. I’m guessing that you’re the sort of person who holds grudges. Not about the little things, but about the big things.’
‘Well …’ Diana was on the ropes. As an officially nice person, she certainly wasn’t going to admit to being a grudge-holder. But Sasha was good at this. ‘Maybe grudge is the wrong word,’ she went on. ‘Maybe you’re the sort of person who believes more in fairness. In justice for wrongdoing.’
They were all agog now, watching Diana’s reactions as they flitted across her face, like cloud-shadows over a statue.
‘I do of course believe in fairness,’ said Diana. ‘And in justice. As I’m sure most worthwhile people do.’
‘Of course,’ said Sasha. ‘Though here’s another thing. About you. I think …’
‘Go on …’
‘Ultimately, if something is meant to be, you are wise enough to accept that.’
‘I am.’
And so Sasha had progressed, with a mixture of flattery and apparent insight that had the effect of getting Diana to admit to more and more about her life. It was like watching therapy in action. You could see that for all her stated belief in people holding themselves together, keeping their self-control and dignity, Diana was longing to talk about these issues. Even with this little audience, perhaps particularly with this little audience, she couldn’t stop herself. She was soon back on to David, the man she had spent twenty-five years with, living and working, and yes, his terrible betrayal. ‘With a woman I never even met,’ she said. Then how, after the affair was over, even though she, Diana, had still been single, and had still, yes, loved him, she couldn’t take him back. Because the trust had gone.
These were the repetitions of an old gramophone record, Francis realized, hearing the story again. The ancient vinyl of her pain, to be replayed over and over until even she was bored with the story and eventually it was just scratches and hiss.
At this point, when you could see that Diana’s big blue eyes were glistening, and she was tired and tipsy from the wine, Sasha had skilfully backed off, to focus on her first significant relationship, the close family one.
‘You’re talking about my father,’ said Diana. ‘There’s hardly any point in trying to conceal that now.’ She looked at the attentive little group around her. ‘I suppose we’re all going to get to know each other better now, trapped as we are. Yes,’ she sighed deeply, but it was almost a relieved sigh, ‘he was the other significant man in my life. Significant by being absent, most of the time. And even when present, not really there. In the sense of wanting to spend any time at all with his young only daughter, who admired him and wanted to be his friend so very much.’
‘What was he?’ asked Liam. ‘In the line of work?’
‘He was an artist,’ said Diana. ‘A painter of oils, landscapes, very much like Cezanne in a way. The Scottish Cezanne, some critic once said, and that stuck. At least in his mind. I don’t personally think he had quite the same level of talent, but he was very competent, and he certainly had the necessary self-belief.’
‘Strange that he didn’t want to spend time with you,’ said Sasha. ‘You’d think, being artistic and all that, he’d be, like, sensitive …’
Diana let out an uncharacteristic squawk of laughter. ‘He was sensitive all right. To himself. Cross him or upset him in any way, shape or form, and he’d fly off the handle. But no, not very sensitive to his daughter. Or his wife, for that matter.’
‘And was she good to you, Diana?’ asked Belle. ‘Your mother?’
‘Oh yes. In her way. But I was always only second fiddle to Daddy, the great artist, even if he did treat her appallingly. Shooting off whenever he wanted, having affairs, drinking too much, gambling – oh yes, all that too.’
‘But she stuck around?’ asked Belle.
‘Oh yes. She stuck around. Like glue. Women did in those days. They were bred to be there for their men, however badly their men behaved.’ She turned towards Sasha. ‘This was in the days before feminism, dear, when it was rather a different world.’
‘I’ve read about this,’ Sasha replied, and it was hard to tell how much irony lay under her powerful surface sincerity.
Diana had spoken some more about her father, but then, suddenly, there had come a cut-off point; as if she’d sobered up and realized she didn’t want everyone knowing everything about her. Francis suspected there was another aspect to the story, deeper and darker. Abuse, even? But she’d pulled back, the shutters had come down, and that was that; at least as a public discourse. She and Sasha sat talking together for some while, and it seemed as if the older woman’s antipathy for the younger might finally have dissipated.
Fuelled up on booze, as they all were, there had then of course been a call for Sasha to ‘do’ someone else. She was reluctant. She didn’t like to overdo it, she said. Or get boring.
‘You’re not boring, dear,’ said Zoe. ‘This is the most fun I’ve had in ages. If you don’t want to do one of us, why don’t you do Francis? He’s always a bit of a mystery man. He teaches us and gets us to write lots of pieces about ourselves and our personal lives, but we never ever find out about him.’
‘I’m fine, honestly,’ Francis had said. ‘Anyway, there’s nothing much to say.’
‘You’re a single man in your forties,’ said Zoe. ‘Of course there is.’
‘There probably is,’ Sasha agreed. ‘But I don’t want to upset my relationship with my excellent tutor.’
‘Creep,’ Zoe said cheerfully.
It was nine thirty now, Francis realized. Time to haul himself from the gloom of the curtained bedroom and get going. He needed a shower and then one of those double-shot coffees from the mighty Gaggia; accompanied, hopefully, by a nice ham roll, if there were any left. The police were coming for more questions, and he wanted to be on form; not to get involved, not this time, but to satisfy his own curiosity about the hare they were now undoubtedly chasing.
The unmarked ‘owl car’ of the Squadra Mobile was already parked in the courtyard when he got downstairs. The usual suspects were littered around the courtyard on deckchairs, reading casually, though it was a defiant sort of casualness.
‘Ah, Francis,’ said Diana, cheerfully, as if last night’s revelations had been nothing but a forgotten bad dream. ‘There you are. You’ve missed breakfast, I’m afraid.’
‘Police already here, I see.’
‘Yes, they’re busy doing the staff at the moment.’
‘Fabio …?’
‘He’s off for the weekend. But yes, Benedetta and all the cooks and waitresses. They’re being very thorough.’
Breakfast had indeed been cleared away from the dining hall, but there was still a collection of pastries on display under one of those wire mesh domes that keep flies off food. Francis made himself a frothy-topped coffee and took that and an apricot-jam-filled bombolone out to one of the deckchairs in the courtyard. There was a choice of sitting near Diana or Tony or Fiona.
He chose Fiona.
‘Good morning,’ he said politely.
‘Morning,’ she replied, not looking up from her book. He decided it would be tactful to leave her to it. He took out Zoe’s memoir, found his place and started reading.
‘How was Gubbio?’ Fiona asked after a couple of minutes.
‘Alarming,’ he replied. ‘I nearly fell off the mountain at one point.’
‘Really? There’s a mountain?’
‘More of a very steep hill that rises up above the town and has a church on top. No, I left the main track up and took a shortcut on a little footpath Gerry had told me about. But I must have got the wrong one, as it led me to a near vertical slope which I slid down for a good twenty yards before being stopped by a rocky outcrop. Anyway, no damage done, apart from scratched wrists and knees.’
‘But you’ve recovered?’
‘I was fine once I’d got back to the main track again. Shaken, but intact.’
‘And what’s the rest of the place like?’
‘Charming. You know, classic Italian town. Up high with narrow old streets. An amazing central piazza, with a great expanse of shiny terracotta tiles. Museum, cathedral. Not a lot of great art, strangely, but I didn’t really have time for that anyway.’
‘I’m sorry we had to miss it.’
This was just politeness, because of course she and her father wouldn’t have had time for sightseeing. ‘So how’s it all going?’ he asked.
‘Slowly. As you’d imagine in Italy. Lots of strange stipulations. Twenty-four hours must pass from the time of death before the body can be prepared for burial or repatriation. That sort of thing. We’ve got most of the logistics sorted now, I’m glad to say.’
‘I thought there was a post-mortem happening.’
‘It’s happened. Yesterday. Not that they release the body in a hurry. We’re hoping to get that back early next week.’
‘Any results?’
‘Not that they’ve shared with us.’
‘I’m sure they will. And then?’
‘Daddy thinks it best to cremate her here. We can take the ashes back and have a memorial service at home. Otherwise there’s a lot of trouble and expense getting the body preserved or embalmed or whatever – before it’s flown back. It’s all very boring, really. As are the other details, like registering the death, which we’ve now discovered we’re not able to do until the post-mortem’s all done and dusted, as we need the pathologist’s certificate to register. We had a fruitless trip to the Palazzo Comunale in Castiglione yesterday to discover that even though the death certificate won’t indicate the cause of death, they still need the first doctor’s certificate showing what the cause of death was to get the death certificate. Et cetera et cetera, on it goes. You even have to cancel the deceased’s passport – did you know that?’
‘I didn’t.’
‘Just in case she decides to shoot off on holiday somewhere. And you can’t do that until you’ve got a copy of the death certificate.’
‘Catch 22.’
‘You can’t even take the ashes back home until you’ve got a consular certificate giving you permission. As well as the death certificate. Anyway, we had a nice Negroni in the main square afterwards. That’s one thing the Italians can do.’
‘Yes,’ Francis agreed. ‘So they’re not interviewing you, anyway?’
‘I think they are.’
‘Really?’
‘They definitely want to talk to Daddy again, and me too, was what that female rottweiler in boots said. Once they’ve finished the staff.’
‘And what are you going to tell them, since you weren’t here?’
‘I don’t know. Background stuff, I suppose. Whether Daddy ever had murderous thoughts towards Poppy.’ She laughed. ‘Which I fear he did, given the way she was. Seriously, though, what I don’t quite get is this: if someone really wanted to bump off Poppy, surely they’d do it back at home. Also, this is a set of entirely random guests who are here to do civilized things, as far as I can see, like write and paint. I mean, unless someone’s found out that Poppy was coming on this course, and deliberately booked on to it too, why would anything bad even be likely. It’s the level of preparation required I can’t quite get my head around.’
‘Only of course if someone really does want to kill someone that much, careful preparation is exactly what they do.’
‘It all seems a bit far-fetched to me.’
Sasha was upon them, cartwheeling across the gravel in a pair of magenta sweatpants and a baggy white T-shirt that read TO YOURSELF in orange letters. This morning, for once, she was without the fuchsia scarf.
‘Good morning, folks!’ she cried. ‘Another beautiful day in paradise.’
Was this supposed to be ironic? Francis wondered.
‘Doesn’t that hurt your hands, doing that?’ Fiona asked.
‘I’m quite used to it. If you do it all the time, like I do, your palms get toughened.’ She spun on her heel and circled off towards the drive. The back of her T-shirt read BE KIND, Francis saw.
Fiona was on her feet. ‘Looks like the tranquillity has gone. Anyway, I’d better go and get Daddy ready for his police interview.’
‘Mind if I slump here?’ said Sasha, returning.
‘Feel free,’ Francis said.
‘Not disturbing you or anything, am I?’
‘Not particularly.’
‘Can I ask you a question?’
‘Please do.’
‘About writing – is that annoying for you?’
‘No,’ said Francis, ‘it’s light relief after all this talk of death.’
‘OK. So when you’re writing your characters in one of your detective novels, are they always based on people you know?’
Francis smiled. He loved the old chestnuts. Next she would be asking him whether he used a pen or a word processor, or whether all chapters should be the same length. ‘It’s a funny thing about characters,’ he replied. ‘In my experience, anyway. They often start based on somebody I know, or at least have met. But then, quite quickly, they morph into something entirely different.’
‘So would it be terrible to take something that a real person had told you in real life and put it straight into the mouth of one of your characters?’
‘I wouldn’t say so. Writers keep their eyes and ears open and incorporate interesting quirks of people they come across into their work all the time. You never know, Sasha, I might end up putting you into something one day.’
She gave him a quizzical look back. ‘But am I interesting enough?’ she said. She accompanied this with a theatrical gesture; lying back, like a fainting Victorian lady, with her palm across her brow. ‘So if there was,’ she went on, sitting up again, ‘like, something someone told you, almost in confidence, is it OK just to take that and use it, d’you think? Is it ethical?’
‘I’m not sure ethical necessarily comes into those sorts of decisions about writing.’
‘Doesn’t it? I thought the whole point of writing was about being ethical.’
‘There may well be an ethical purpose behind the whole work, and yet the writer might be quite ruthless in practice, in getting what he or she wants and needs.’
‘The end justifies the means kind of thing.’
‘Exactly.’
‘So I could borrow something that somebody said …’
He was wondering what she was so burningly interested in. Something from last night? Liam’s story? Diana’s? Or was it something – someone – else entirely?
‘Who are we talking about?’ he asked.
‘I’d rather not say. Anyway, not necessarily anyone here. Just the principle, I suppose. It keeps coming up.’
‘It will do. What can I say? Different writers do different things. Have you read any Rachel Cusk?’
‘No, should I?’
‘She doesn’t have many scruples about using real-life models. You might find her work encouraging. I suppose the bottom line here is: who would ever know? I mean, where do you live? In Oregon, I think you said.’
‘Portland, Oregon, yes.’
‘Quite a long way away from here. I doubt the person in question is ever likely to see what you write.’
‘Unless my book becomes an international bestseller and they go, “Hey, wasn’t that that crazy chick we met on that writing course in Tuscany?”.’
Francis laughed. ‘Umbria,’ he corrected. Then: ‘That’s a risk only you can decide on.’ They sat in silence for a few moments. ‘For someone allegedly crazy, Sasha,’ he went on, ‘I was quite impressed with your efforts last night.’
‘Were you?’ She looked at him coyly, eyes wide, finger on her lips.
‘Is it something you often do?’ he asked.
‘Only when I’m drunk.’ She laughed; that loud, self-regarding laugh that peppered her talk about herself.
‘For someone who was drunk it was pretty perceptive.’
‘It’s not rocket science, Francis. For example’ – she lowered her voice – ‘if you’re talking about a single person of a certain age, you can usually suppose that they’ve probably had at least one major relationship in their lives. Either satisfactory or unsatisfactory. You only have to prod them a little to get them going. And almost everyone has a complex thing going with their parents, not to mention some ambition they wish they’d achieved …’
‘I still think that’s all quite perceptive. For a young woman of, what, twenty-three.’
‘Twenty-four. Please don’t patronize me.’
‘Sorry. I was trying to compliment you.’ He paused for a moment. ‘So would it be patronizing to ask if you’ve had your one major relationship yet?’
‘Depends what you mean by major. I’ve not been married.’
‘And your parents?’
‘Divorced. When I was little. They’re both quite cool, but not people you’d look up to particularly.’
‘So what was your dad’s burning ambition then?’
‘To be Jimmy Page.’
Francis laughed. ‘I guess he didn’t pull that off then.’
‘In a limited circle he did. He’s reasonably well-known in the jazz clubs of Portland. Catfish Lou’s, places like that.’
‘Sasha White-Moloney!’ It was the young policeman, stumbling on the surname, calling from the front door.
‘I think that might be you,’ said Francis.
‘Okey-dokey.’ She got to her feet and smoothed her hair. ‘Coming. Arrivi! Pronto! Is that it?’
‘Pronto’s what they say out here when they answer the phone,’ said Zoe, from her deckchair. ‘Ridiculous girl.’
‘Wow,’ Sasha said, when she emerged, twenty minutes later. ‘They’re getting quite forensic in there. Ping ping ping, question after question.’
‘Such as?’ Francis asked.
‘Why did I choose this course? Did I really find it on the Internet? What other courses did I consider? Who paid for me to come out here? Had I ever met or known any of the people on the course before? As if.’
‘They really do suspect foul play,’ Francis said, ‘by the sounds of it.’
‘“Foul play”,’ said Sasha with a laugh. ‘That’s such a strange expression. What does it mean? Murder, I guess.’
‘It comes from Shakespeare,’ Francis said. ‘Hamlet blamed his father’s death on “some foul play”.’
‘Is that right?’
‘Diana MacDonald!’ It was the young policeman again, calling from the front door. Diana rose slowly from her deckchair. ‘Off I go,’ she muttered, looking round at them with an almost proud smile. She proceeded over the gravel like a tall ship under sail.
Francis was the last to be called. It was almost lunchtime when he made his way into the gloom of the library, where he found Marta Moretti, the procuratore sostituto, Leonardo Sabatini and the older policeman who had accompanied him that first morning of Poppy’s death. This grey-haired figure was almost classically handsome, with film star cheekbones and chin, only let down by a large nose. His thoughtful brown eyes, too, were set a little too close together for him to be invited to appear on the front of the Saga catalogue, or its Italian equivalent. Marta introduced him as Vice Questore Ceccarelli, from the police headquarters – or questura – in Perugia. A questore from the questura – he was clearly a big cheese.
‘Mr Meadowes,’ Marta began, riffling through her notes. ‘May I call you Francis?’
‘Please do.’
‘Last time we spoke you confirmed you were here as a writing tutor of some experience. And that you were also a writer – in fact, a crime writer. You didn’t tell us, though, that you had some experience as a detective.’
She looked at him, a neatly trimmed eyebrow raised.
Francis shrugged. ‘Well …’
‘One of the others has “grassed you up”, I’m afraid. To use one of my favourite English expressions.’ She turned to her colleagues and muttered a couple of words in Italian. Spia, it sounded like, and then tradito. Ceccarelli nodded. ‘It seems you solved a murder case yourself,’ Marta continued, ‘at an English festival.’
‘I helped,’ said Francis. ‘A little. The police also did their bit.’
‘I’m sure you must say that,’ Marta said. ‘At least to us. Our informer tells us, though, that this case was quite famous. You were in the news, I think.’
‘For a very short while.’
‘Not that short,’ said Marta. ‘I Googled you.’
It was funny how things were, Francis thought. People always talked about his role in the murders at the Mold-on-Wold literary festival four years back, ‘The Festival Murders’ as the press had dubbed them. But finding the person responsible hadn’t been difficult. He was prouder, personally, of what he’d achieved on a cruise along the coast of West Africa, three years later; though what had happened on the Golden Adventurer had barely been reported. A small news item about a woman who had fallen overboard, suspected suicide, and that was that. Cruise lines liked to keep their secrets and there was no campaigning investigative newspaper for the high seas.
‘So I was wondering,’ Moretti went on, ‘perhaps you might have some ideas about the situation here since you know all the participants of the courses better than we do. And have their trust. What are they saying? What are you thinking? If I may ask.’
‘Nobody knows what to think,’ Francis replied, truthfully. ‘Mainly because nobody knows for sure what Poppy died from. We know there’s been a post-mortem, but we don’t know if that’s concluded,’ he fibbed, ‘or what any results might be. And so, as you’d imagine, there’s just speculation. Some think – or thought anyway – that you guys were only taking an interest because we were a bunch of foreigners staying in a nice villa.’
Marta looked round at Ceccarelli and did a quick translation. ‘I am glad they think we have so much time,’ he said to Francis in a thick accent.
‘I personally assumed something serious must be up,’ Francis replied. ‘Especially when you confiscated the passports. That put the wind up them, certainly.’
‘Spaventati,’ glossed Marta to Ceccarelli, who nodded and replied quickly in Italian.
‘Sí,’ said Marta. ‘We have to do that,’ she went on to Francis, ‘if we have any reasonable suspicion.’
‘That’s what they thought,’ he replied. ‘But it unsettled them. As did the search. Some of them are suspicious of a foreign police force. They don’t understand how you operate. They don’t, to be absolutely frank with you, quite trust you. Gerry had to explain the difference between the Polizia di Stato and the Carabinieri the other night. At least one of them is worried that you’re routinely armed.’
Marta looked round at Ceccarelli, who repeated ‘Carabinieri’ and raised his eyebrows. ‘So they think we are about to shoot them?’ she said with a smile.
‘Not really. But they are old, some of them, set in their ways. They would feel more comfortable with police who spoke their language. You understand.’
‘Of course, it’s natural. Perhaps we should put on those nice English helmets, like the big gherkins, make them feel at home.’
As Francis chuckled politely, Marta translated her joke to Ceccarelli, who laughed too. ‘Perhaps you should,’ Francis said. ‘And then,’ he went on, ‘Stephanie told me, in strict confidence, that the necroscopo had some idea Poppy might have been poisoned.’
This had the desired result.
‘Avvelenata?’ asked Ceccarelli.
‘Sí,’ Marta replied quickly. And then to Francis. ‘You say “strict confidence”. So the others haven’t heard this?’
‘No. I don’t think so. Stephanie didn’t believe it. “My guests aren’t the Borgias,” she said to me.’
Moretti translated, but there was no laughter from Ceccarelli this time.
‘So have you had the result of the autopsy?’ Francis asked.
Marta turned to Sabatini and Ceccarelli and they had a short three-way consultation, which Francis got the gist of but couldn’t properly follow.
Finally Marta turned back with a smile. ‘We have. We would insist, obviously, that you keep this to yourself. But yes, she was poisoned. It was cyanide, which as I’m sure you know, acts almost immediately.’
Even though he’d asked for it, he was surprised the police were sharing such sensitive information with him. Whoever had revealed his detective past must have bigged him up quite considerably. Unless of course they had some other motive? Getting him on side against the others?
‘Cyanide,’ he repeated slowly. Despite what Stephanie had told him, and his other developing suspicions, he was shocked. There was now no longer any pretending that this wasn’t murder, and cyanide spoke of a level of preparation that put any thoughts of accident or opportunism to one side. Where had the murderer – for yes, that’s who he or she was – got it from? It was hardly something you’d risk bringing through airport security. Although you wouldn’t need a lot. He couldn’t remember how much was fatal, but it was well below the 100 mg limit for liquids in hand luggage, let alone unchecked hold luggage. It could easily be hidden in a nail varnish bottle or similar. This explained the reason for the surprise search of the villa; though surely if you were organized enough to bring cyanide on the plane, you wouldn’t be leaving it lying around your room.
‘We don’t think it would be helpful to share this with the others,’ Moretti went on. ‘It might create some kind of a panic. You all still have to live together. Meanwhile, Francis, if you find you have any new information or suspicions, we would ask you to help us.’
‘Of course.’ He was flattered if puzzled that they seemed to have ruled him out as a suspect himself. God help him, though, it might not be wise to be too closely identified with the police, especially as he was still sleeping in an unlocked room.
‘And what about Stephanie and Gerry?’ he asked. ‘Do they know all this?’
‘Yes, we have told the hosts.’
They too, it seemed, were not under suspicion. But they weren’t off Francis’s own personal list. ‘And how does this work with being trapped in the sauna?’ he went on. ‘You think she was poisoned before she went in?’
‘She must have been,’ said Moretti. ‘The killer, perhaps, hoped that the broken sauna would be a distraction. That we wouldn’t be looking for any other cause of death.’
‘Yes,’ said Francis.
‘As to the rest of the case,’ Marta asked, ‘is there anything else you want to share with us now?’
‘I’m no clearer than you are, I’m afraid.’
Moretti sat looking at him, almost as if she didn’t believe him.
‘I’m not protecting anyone, if that’s what you think.’
‘We don’t think that. However …’ She looked over at Ceccarelli again, as if asking permission.
‘Do you know about this big house that Sir Duncan owns?’ she asked. ‘In the English countryside. Framley Place.’
‘Grange,’ Francis corrected her.
She nodded. ‘Apparently he gave a talk about it to you all the other evening.’
‘He did. A PowerPoint presentation, with slides.’
‘One of your fellow guests said he was very proud of it. And in particular the beautiful garden.’
‘He was. He is.’
‘But as I understand it from his daughter, and also now from him, Framley Place, Framley Grange was a property owned by Poppy. Inherited from her father.’
‘That’s right, yes.’
Maybe, Ms Moretti elaborated, Duncan loved the house but not his wife any more. If he divorced her he would lose it. Maybe there was even another woman involved. It was possible, Francis agreed; although he had to say that Duncan had appeared to get on fine with his wife, when she was alive.
‘If he was planning to kill her,’ Moretti said, ‘he would hardly allow himself to be arguing with her, would he? In front of the other guests.’
‘This is true,’ Francis agreed; he didn’t share what Fiona had told him about them not getting on well recently. That was for her to tell them, if she wanted to.
There were more suspects and theories to be considered. Francis gave his honest input to each, though none of them convinced him or, he realized, them. By the time they let him go, twenty minutes later, he had a strong suspicion that the police were as much in the dark as he was. Unless, that is, they had decided to construct an elaborate double bluff. Moretti handed him her card, with an invitation to call her if anything occurred to him or anything else interesting came to light.
‘So you’re not letting them go any time soon?’ he asked, as he took leave of them.
‘This woman was poisoned,’ Moretti replied bluntly. ‘They are all suspects in a clear case of murder. All I can hope is that this pressure cooker will make one of them crack.’