Next morning, Diana was wakened by loud knocking. She pulled on a robe and opened the door to see two policemen standing there, with her padrona behind them.
‘Mrs Bailey, you were supposed to stay in Torre Astura. We need to ask you some questions,’ one said in English.
Diana folded her arms protectively across her chest. ‘Yes, of course. If you’ll just let me get dressed.’ She nodded to the padrona, who didn’t seem best pleased at this visitation.
‘Meet us downstairs and we’ll drive you to the station. Bring your papers.’
As she dressed, Diana shook herself mentally. She had to give the police all the information she could to help them find out what happened to Helen. It was imperative that they solved the mystery or her family and friends would be left hanging on, wondering. She still didn’t know what she thought herself but the police were better at this kind of thing. If she gave them the information, they’d work it out. She felt a frisson of nerves, but quelled them. She was an intelligent woman with a PhD from Oxford. She could handle this.
She sat in the back of a police car and was driven out in the direction of Cinecittà for about twenty minutes, until they pulled up outside a large building with a sign saying Questura Polizia di Stato over the door. They led her straight into a small room with a table and three chairs. The only window was high up in one wall. Her stomach rumbled and she wished she had grabbed some breakfast before she left.
‘Could I have a glass of water, please?’ she asked in Italian.
‘Sit down, Mrs Bailey,’ an officer told her. ‘We are going to go through the entire story from the beginning. Someone will bring your water in due course. Can you answer in Italian or would you like us to find a translator?’
She could tell he didn’t want the bother of finding a translator, so agreed to speak Italian.
They wanted to see her passport, her residence permit and the permit to work that had been obtained for her by Twentieth Century Fox. They asked about her job in England and that of her husband, how she had got the post at Cinecittà and when she first met Helen. Many of the questions seemed inconsequential but Diana answered them with painstaking honesty. A young officer was writing everything down and sometimes she paused to give him time to catch up.
They were stony-faced when she talked about her affair with Ernesto. They had already reacted with disbelief that she would leave her husband to take a job in another country so she couldn’t expect them to understand the terrible mistake she had made getting involved with a married man. They’d written her off as a scarlet woman. At last the glass of water arrived. It was warm and tasted stale but she gulped it down gratefully.
Next she had the difficult task of explaining her argument with Helen. She lowered her head and chose her words with great care, trying to make them understand exactly what had happened. She mentioned going back to try to find her at five o’clock then seeing her in a café with a friend of hers called Luigi.
‘Who is this Luigi?’ the officer asked instantly.
‘I don’t know,’ Diana told them honestly. ‘Helen never talked about him. We often saw him in clubs or bars but she didn’t seem close to him. I’m not sure why she was with him last Wednesday.’
‘What does he look like?’
Diana described him as best she could. Dark, curlyish hair. Swarthy.
‘Do you know where we could find him?’
‘He usually hangs around the Via Veneto in the evening, but I don’t know where he lives or works. Sorry.’
‘Do you know a young American man with short fair hair? According to a neighbour he visited Helen at her apartment on Wednesday evening.’
Diana ran through a mental list of the American men Helen might have known at Cinecittà but couldn’t imagine who the visitor might have been.
‘She was very distressed during his visit. The neighbour heard her crying. Next morning she went to the film studios but didn’t do any work. She said she felt ill and lay down in a spare dressing room, and then in the afternoon she decided to come and find you. Do you have any idea why?’
Diana repeated that she could only presume Helen wanted to make up their argument, but when she reached Torre Astura she couldn’t find her.
It was stuffy in the interview room and she felt weak with hunger. Suddenly the officer stood and left the room without explanation. She addressed the younger man, the one taking notes. ‘Do you think I could have some more water, please?’ She had to repeat it twice before he understood what she was asking, and she worried that if he had trouble understanding her Italian it didn’t bode well for the accuracy of the notes he was taking.
‘Soon,’ he said, without indicating when that would be.
The first officer reappeared. ‘We want to find both of the men she met the night before she died. Perhaps you will be so good as to come out with us tonight and help us to identify this Luigi?’
Diana agreed. ‘Yes, we can certainly have a look.’
The police dropped her off at home around lunchtime and she hurried straight into the trattoria for some food. She was starving, and ordered more than she could eat. ‘Eyes bigger than your stomach,’ she remembered her dad teasing her and that made the tears come.
At ten that evening the same police officer picked her up and drove her to Via Veneto, accompanied by another officer she hadn’t met. She felt self-conscious walking into bars and nightclubs with two uniformed policemen by her side. People turned and stared. In one bar, there was a group she recognised from Cinecittà and they whispered behind their hands as they watched her gazing around the room.
She took the police to four different places without success but as they came out of the last one, suddenly she saw Luigi walking up the hill towards them.
‘That’s him,’ she pointed. ‘That’s Luigi.’
He saw her pointing and his eyes darted quickly from her to the policemen as if trying to decide whether to flee. They drew alongside him and the first officer asked if he would mind answering some questions about Helen.
‘No, of course I wouldn’t mind,’ he said straight away. ‘I was very sad to hear about what happened to her. A mutual friend told me earlier.’
‘Can you come with us?’ they asked, and he agreed.
‘Thank you. That’s all we need from you for now, Mrs Bailey,’ she was told. ‘Call us if you have any inspiration about who the American man might be.’
She agreed that she would, and watched as the officers walked towards the police car with Luigi between them. Suddenly he turned and gave Diana a look of such venom that she froze. His lip was raised in a sneer and hatred blazed in his eyes. He looked as though he wanted to kill her, and might well have tried had the officers not been present.
Diana leant against a wall feeling deeply shaken. At that moment she became convinced that Luigi had been involved in Helen’s death. Maybe Helen had been running away from him when she came to Torre Astura but he caught up with her and killed her before she could reach Diana. How on earth had Helen known someone like that? At that moment he certainly looked capable of murder.
The police car drew off with Luigi in the back. With a wave of panic, Diana remembered that he knew where she lived. The very first evening she went out with Helen, Luigi had been in the taxi when it picked her up. Would he remember? She was on the second floor and usually left her shutters open at night but she decided to close them before going to sleep that evening. She would bolt her door from the inside as well. Suddenly she didn’t feel safe any more.