Trevor woke with a start. The sun was setting over the ocean and when he looked at his watch he saw it was almost eight o’clock. Four hours had gone by. He wasn’t sure whether the studio driver had waited for him. If not, he would have to find his own way back to Rome.
As soon as he leaned forward, he felt a jabbing pain in his lower back. He must have slept in an awkward position and it had triggered his old trouble. He clutched the arm of the bench and rose carefully, leaning his weight into his arms, before straightening up slowly. He rubbed the painful spot, trying to relax the tense muscles, before he started hobbling across the field towards the film set.
He made his way to the gatehouse and, as he drew near, he saw that the night guard was sitting reading a newspaper.
‘Hello, do you speak English?’ Trevor asked.
‘A leettle.’ The guard put down his paper.
‘I’m Diana Bailey’s husband.’
‘Ah, yes, yes.’ The guard seemed to understand.
‘Can I ask you some questions about what happened here?’
‘Of course.’ He pulled out a chair for Trevor to sit down, wiping the seat with his sleeve.
Trevor retrieved the photograph of Helen from his jacket pocket. It was becoming rather dog-eared. ‘Did you see this girl?’
‘Yes, yes.’
Trevor wasn’t sure if he had understood the question. ‘This is the girl who died in the water.’ He pointed towards the Mediterranean. ‘Did you see her before she died?’
‘Yes, before.’
Trevor felt the stirrings of hope. ‘When did you see her?’
‘Almost twelve at night. Mezzanotte. She come here. She ask for Diana.’
‘What did you tell her?’
‘I tell her Diana is in the pensione.’ He pointed.
‘Was Helen alone?’
‘Yes, alone.’
So Luigi wasn’t with her at that stage. ‘How did she look?’
The guard shook his head. ‘She look sad.’ He waggled his fingers under his eyes to indicate crying. ‘Not good.’
‘And did she go to the pensione?’
‘Yes, I see her.’ He pointed at the door of the pensione.
‘Did you see her after that?’
The guard shook his head. ‘No. Not until the morning, when she is dead.’
‘You didn’t see her with my wife, with Diana?’
‘No.’ He shook his head emphatically.
So this guard wasn’t the witness. Who on earth could it have been?
The guard spoke, obviously keen to communicate something. ‘Non credo che sia vero che qualcuno ha visto loro due lottare. È così tranquillo qui che avrei sentito. Credo che qualcuno stia mentendo.’
Trevor couldn’t understand what he meant. The guard repeated himself and Trevor tried to pick out a few individual words but it was beyond him. Damn and blast it that he had never been any good at languages.
‘Is my driver here?’ he asked, miming a steering wheel. Perhaps he could translate.
‘He go to Roma,’ the guard said. ‘I call taxi for you?’ He mimed a telephone.
Trevor considered his options. He was reluctant to leave with nothing to show for the trip. Perhaps he could find someone to translate while he asked the night guard more questions, since he seemed to be the last person to admit to seeing Helen alive.
‘Could I stay here tonight?’ he asked, then mimed sleeping and pointed to the pensione. ‘Maybe I could stay in Diana’s room?’
‘OK,’ the guard said. ‘Room number eleven.’
Trevor rose from the chair, wincing and clutching his back, then shook the guard’s hand. ‘Thank you, sir. Thank you for your help.’
The guard nodded and watched him walk slowly up the road.
There was no bell on the outside of the lodging house but the door was ajar so Trevor walked into a hallway. A radio was playing a song he recognised called ‘Volare’. Dean Martin had sung it, he was pretty sure, but this sounded like an Italian version. He couldn’t imagine where he’d absorbed this information, but occasionally he was called upon to supervise parties at the students’ union so it might have been there.
‘Hello?’ he called. No one appeared so he shouted louder. ‘Hello?’
A teenage girl emerged from an adjoining room but it soon became evident that she spoke no English at all. He saw some keys hanging on the wall behind a chair, so he pointed at them and held up his ten fingers and then his thumb to indicate number eleven. Without questioning, the girl handed him the key for number eleven, then gestured down a dim hallway.
He reached the door that had a number eleven on it, although he hesitated for a moment because the second figure had come loose and hung sideways, like the stem of a seven. When he put the key in the lock, it turned and the door opened. He switched on the light and looked in and straight away he could see the room was grim. The bed hadn’t been made up, so there was just a grey blanket over a bare mattress. There was a rotten smell he soon tracked down to some rubbish in a wastepaper basket. Everything was musty.
He went to pull back the curtains and was surprised to see they covered just a window. Where was the patio looking down towards the sea? For a few moments he stood, puzzled, then it dawned on him that this must be the wrong room. He went back to examine the number eleven on the door with its loose figure. The next room along was numbered twelve, though, so this must be eleven. How strange!
He had started to pull the door closed when he heard a rustling sound and realised a piece of paper was stuck underneath it. He retrieved the paper and saw that it was a sheet torn from a diary that had been folded in half so it was maybe three inches long by two across. It was an English diary, with the days ‘Monday 4th, Tuesday 5th’. He opened the paper and what he saw made goosebumps stand out on his skin. The page was covered with scrawled handwriting, much of it virtually illegible, but at the top it said ‘Dear Diana’ and at the bottom it read ‘Love, Helen’ with three X’s. Why hadn’t the police found this? It must have been there since the night Helen died.
He sat down on the bed to decipher the note:
Where are you? I need you so much. I’ve made such a mess of everything and there’s no one else I can turn to. I pray you are still here. They said you would be. I don’t have a room and I don’t even have enough money to get back to town. I want to go home, Diana. I’ve got mixed up with some really bad people and I can’t cope any more, but I don’t have enough money for a plane ticket. I went out looking for my friend Scott in Via Veneto tonight to ask if I could borrow it from him but he wasn’t there. Then I asked Ernesto but he refused to lend me a penny and none of the American girls have any cash. So that’s when I thought of you. I know we argued but you’re so nice, I’m sure you’ll help. I suppose I’ll sneak onto the set and find some shelter until you come and find me. Please hurry. You’re my only hope.
Helen had scribbled this the night she died. Someone must have told her that Diana was in room eleven.
He walked back out to the reception area and, using sign language, communicated to the teenage girl that it was the wrong room. She disappeared and returned with an older woman, the padrona, who fortunately spoke English. Trevor explained who he was and showed her the note he had found.
‘Madre mia,’ the padrona exclaimed. ‘I didn’t see her.’ She asked the teenager, who claimed she hadn’t seen her either. ‘She must have crept in while we were upstairs. We didn’t hear a thing, not so much as a raised voice. There was no argument. I told the police your wife is innocent.’
Trevor’s first instinct was to ask them to call the police. They should see this note. But then he realised that it only proved Helen had been looking for Diana; it didn’t prove she hadn’t found her. Where could Helen have gone after slipping that note under the door? She must have crossed the field at the back of the boarding house and sneaked onto the set without being seen by the night guard. She’d be looking for somewhere to shelter. He cast his mind round the set, with all the two-dimensional structures, and suddenly it came to him: the only place where she’d be under cover was on the converted fishing boat.
Holding the note, he hurried back down the road to the night guard. He showed him the piece of paper and explained what he thought might have happened, and he kept repeating, ‘The boat. Can we look?’ and pointing out towards the jetty.
He wasn’t sure how much the guard understood, but he picked up a torch and shone a light to illuminate the way as he accompanied Trevor to the barge. It was tethered to the end of the jetty but bobbing in the water and there was a gap of about a foot to leap across to get on board. As Trevor landed on deck, he jarred his back and he yelped in pain. The guard crossed nimbly behind him.
The little turreted area in the centre of the deck turned out to be the wheelroom; there was no space where Helen could have slept. In the ship’s hold, mechanisms to operate the oars had been installed. It may have been converted to a warship but it still stunk of the fish that had been flung there over the years. The guard shone the torch into every nook and cranny but there was no sign that Helen had been there. Trevor had hoped to find her handbag, perhaps, or her shoes – she had been barefoot when found, Diana said – but there was nothing.
He went out on deck again and walked towards the prow. The boat was swaying with the movements of the waves and he had to clutch the rail around the edge for balance. How had Helen managed, especially if she’d been high on drugs at the time?
‘Where was her body found?’ he asked, and the guard pointed to an area a couple of hundred yards across the bay.
Trevor walked right up to the prow and stood looking out at the spot. It was too dark to see which way the current was flowing. He clutched the rail and under his fist he felt an uneven edge. One section didn’t fit snugly against the next. When he pushed against it, it gave way and he realised it was broken. He called the guard across.
‘Look!’
‘È rotto. Lei sarebbe potuta cadere là,’ the guard said. He wiggled the loose section and it came away entirely in his hand.
They both stared down into the black water ten feet below.
‘I call the police,’ the guard said, and Trevor agreed. His heart was thumping with excitement. Helen could have fallen against the broken rail and tumbled into the water. If so, that meant Diana was in the clear. But what if the police claimed Diana pushed her?
They rang the state police first of all, but no one answered. By this time it was ten at night. ‘Is closed,’ the guard said. Then he rang the carabinieri and spoke to them, explaining the circumstances. Trevor heard Diana’s and Helen’s names being repeated several times, and the tone was insistent, but when the guard hung up he said apologetically, ‘They come tomorrow morning.’
Trevor was disappointed but he supposed they wouldn’t have been able to see anything at night. He’d have to be patient. He shook hands with the guard, agreed to come back first thing in the morning, then hurried down to the trattoria for a meal before they closed the kitchen. If only he could telephone Diana to tell her. It was excruciating not to be able to share this new information, but inmates couldn’t receive incoming calls.
After eating, he went back to the pensione, and the padrona showed him to the room Diana had occupied, the one with the patio terrace.
‘Your wife was a nice lady. I hope they will release her soon.’ She noticed that Trevor was clutching his back as he stood. ‘But look at you. You have a pain in the back. Let me bring you some aspirina.’
Trevor gratefully accepted the pills and a glass of water and swallowed them before easing himself down onto the bed and arranging a pillow to support the side that was especially fragile.
The room was dark and airless and he lay sweating, his mind working overtime. Surely Diana must be released after his discoveries? Her affair was over and her work on the film was almost done. Would that mean she would come back to him? Would they fly home together? He knew things could never be the same but surely they could move on. Perhaps this trauma would even strengthen their bond.
He imagined them at their Primrose Hill flat, sitting in the kitchen with a cup of tea, but the vision still felt far away, more pipe dream than reality. He was too old, too impotent. It wasn’t fair of him to hold her back. He truly loved her … and perhaps in the end that meant he would have to let her go.