Chapter 13
WEDNESDAY LATE MORNING
Rosina the housekeeper kindly made four little cups of strong black coffee, and we took them back to the lounge. While we sipped these, trying not to scald our tongues, Virgilio ran through the list of suspects.
‘As far as the first murder is concerned, there’s the ex-wife who would have us believe that it was sheer chance that she happened to be here in Florence on the exact same day that he was murdered.
Along with her is her boyfriend with a military background who would have known all about firearms and who is in the same regiment as Angel.
There’s Donald Hicks, the second in command, who stood to take over the company, although his murder makes it less likely – but not impossible – that he was Angel’s killer. ’
We all nodded in agreement and he went on.
‘Penelope Green may or may not have had a relationship with Angel, but there’s no evidence of any kind suggesting Angel’s death was a crime of passion.
Eddie Smith, the odd-job man, certainly looks tough enough to commit murder, but I got the feeling that his shock at hearing of Angel’s death was genuine.
I’m not writing him off, but I’m not considering him as a principal suspect for now.
That leaves us with Carl Sinclair, the American PR man, Liam O’Connell, the technical director, Alexander Murray, the head of sales, Vincent Archer, the financial director, and Peter Schneider, the big bodyguard – not forgetting Emilia Cortez.
’ Virgilio glanced at the other two officers.
‘When you interviewed these people earlier today, did you get the feeling that any of them might be our killer? Also, although I’ve tended to discount them, there’s the housekeeper and her husband.
Did any of those people strike you as suspicious? ’
Marco and the sergeant looked at each other before he answered first. ‘Not really. The American is the only man without a military background, which could mean that he’s less familiar with weapons, but, of course, he’s American, and we all know how many guns there are over there.
Penelope Green and Emilia Cortez have no military background either, but firing a little pistol wouldn’t be that hard.
Of the others, Liam O’Connell struck me as the toughest of the bunch.
There was a hard edge to him, and I got the feeling he maybe hadn’t been particularly fond of Angel.
In fact, to be honest, I didn’t get the impression that any of them had particularly liked their boss – certainly, none of them, apart from Eddie Smith, looked genuinely sorry that he’s dead.
However, we couldn’t come up with any kind of motive for any of them to have murdered Angel. ’
I nodded in agreement. ‘And the others?’
‘We couldn’t pin down any kind of motive for any of the others, and neither of us felt that the couple who look after this place, Amedeo Rospo or his wife, Rosina, could have been involved, not least as neither of them went down to Florence yesterday morning.
They live in an apartment in what used to be the old stable block at the side of the villa, and the security cameras show them going over there at about ten-thirty last night and not emerging until early this morning, so they would appear not to have had the opportunity to murder the second victim either. ’
Virgilio looked across at the three of us. ‘Is there anybody we haven’t considered – apart, of course, from a possible hitman sent by some foreign organisation? And what about the Hicks murder? Assuming it was an inside job, who might have had a motive for murdering him?’
Sergeant Dini took a stab at it. ‘How’s this for a possible scenario?
Vincent Archer dreams up a way of skimming money from the company’s accounts – as overall financial director, he would have had the best opportunity – but Angel finds out.
Penelope Green told Dan that she heard Angel shouting at Archer something along the lines of, “How could you do such a thing?” Maybe that was a reference to the embezzlement.
Archer murders Angel to keep him quiet, and then realises that if he kills Hicks, he will become head of the company, so he poisons him and tries to make it look like suicide. ’
I queried what Emilia Cortez had told us. ‘Did anybody manage to get through to the law firm where Cortez works to check how often she and Angel met up?’
It came as no surprise to find that ever-efficient Sergeant Dini had already done this.
‘They’ve confirmed that the two of them only met on three previous occasions, and all of the meetings took place in the offices of the law firm.
Angel didn’t even go out for lunch or dinner with her.
Something else that occurs to me is that most of the men here spent time in the British Army – and Angel and Hicks were both in the same regiment.
I wonder if there might be a link to something that happened in the past, and this was payback. ’
I saw Virgilio consider her suggestion. ‘It’s an interesting thought.
Mr Nelson from the British embassy in Rome has promised Dan that he’ll dig down a bit deeper into the backgrounds of the suspects.
Let’s see what he comes up with. Maybe the roots of Angel’s murder and even Hicks’s murder go back a long way. ’
Suddenly, an unexpected and most unwelcome thought occurred to me.
What if Dini had hit the nail on the head, and the murders of Tristan Angel and Donald Hicks were linked to events in the British army years ago?
Yesterday morning, Tristan Angel had been in the duomo at roughly the same time as Donald Hicks, a former member of the Grenadier Guards.
Jane Taylor-Mead’s boyfriend, Simon Frost, had also been in Florence at the time, even if he had denied going into the cathedral.
But, I suddenly remembered, there had also been another former British army officer in the duomo at that time.
It came like a punch to the solar plexus when I realised that my future son-in-law – unaccompanied by Tricia – had been there as well.
I knew from what Tricia had told me that Shaun had been an officer in one of the Guards regiments, but I didn’t know which one.
Angel, Hicks and Frost had been in the Grenadier Guards.
What if Shaun had also been in the Grenadier Guards and had come here to avenge something bad that had happened in the past?
Shaun had told me he joined the army fifteen years ago, two years before Angel and Hicks had left the regiment.
Might their paths – and swords – have crossed?
Was it even possible that Shaun had known Simon Frost all those years ago, and the two of them had got together to plan Tristan Angel’s murder here in Florence?
No sooner had I thought it, than I did my best to chase the idea from my head.
It was ridiculous, surely. Shaun’s army career could only have overlapped with Angel and Hicks by a couple of years, during which Shaun would have been a very junior officer and Angel and Hicks far more experienced senior officers, who probably wouldn’t even have registered the existence of either Shaun or Frost. Besides, I told myself, Shaun couldn’t be a murderer.
He was a very nice man who was going to make my daughter an excellent husband.
I could almost hear a heartbroken Tricia asking me how I could possibly even begin to think that her fiancé could be a murderer.
Was I seriously considering ruining my daughter’s happiness?
The repercussions of an accusation such as this were too awful to consider.
But I knew that I had to entertain this as a possibility, however remote.
The trouble with being a detective is that, inevitably, everybody becomes a suspect.
Although in a court of law, every defendant should be considered innocent until proved guilty, in my line of business, everybody is potentially guilty until I can rule them out.
Mind you, it should be simple to check whether Shaun really had been in the Grenadier Guards.
If not, then he was in the clear and I could forget about it.
If, on the other hand, it turned out that he had been in that regiment then…
‘Are you all right, Dan?’
Virgilio sounded concerned. Oscar must have sensed something in my mood because he abandoned his position alongside Sergeant Dini and trotted over to lean against my leg and give me a questioning look.
I reached down to scratch his ears and tried hard to shake the uncomfortable thought from my head.
‘I’m fine, thanks. Just trying to get my head around the case.
’ I took a deep breath and did my best to sweep away any thought of Shaun as a killer.
‘If we ignore Rosina and her husband, we’re left with eight suspects here at the villa for Hicks’s murder.
As it seems pretty well definite that nobody can have got in from outside last night to kill him, his murder must have been committed by one of the eight here.
Any one of those also had the opportunity to murder Angel in the duomo yesterday, although Alexander Murray and Peter Schneider say they didn’t visit the duomo yesterday morning, but there’s no proof of that either way.
So unless it turns out that Angel was murdered by a foreign government or whatever, I tend to think that we’re looking for one killer for both murders.
Or do any of you think that I’m wrong? The more I think about it, the more convinced I am that somebody here at the villa killed both of them. ’