Chapter 22
SUNDAY LATE MORNING
Diego saw me coming and he was already pulling out my replica Renaissance mug and two bottles of ice-cold beer by the time I got to him. He filled the mug to the top and handed it over to me.
‘Busy morning?’
I took a big mouthful of beer and let it slide slowly down my throat. It was another boiling-hot day and the refreshment was very welcome. Diego pointed downwards and I saw that he had even prepared a bowl of water for Oscar, so the two of us quenched our thirst together before I gave my answer.
‘I’ve been acting as interpreter while the inspector has been questioning the guests. She strikes me as a very competent officer.’
‘And is she getting anywhere with the investigation?’ I saw him take a careful look around but, for the moment, we were alone. ‘Do you really think it was one of this lot?’ He waved in the general direction of the guest bedrooms.
There was no point in dissimulation. ‘It looks that way.’
‘So who do you think did it?’
I decided to turn the tables on him. ‘I’m still trying to work that out. Do you have any theories?’
He leant towards me and lowered his voice. ‘You know what I think? I think whoever killed that poor woman last night was actually trying to kill Miss Graceland.’
‘You could well be right, but why?’
Still keeping his voice low, he continued.
‘I’ve been talking to Mary this morning, and she’s been telling me some of the stuff that Miss Graceland says in her autobiography.
By the sound of it, there are some really rotten apples here.
Any one of them could have done it out of spite, or to shut her up. ’
‘You could be right about that as well. Any thoughts on who the perpetrator or perpetrators might be?’
He shook his head but he hadn’t finished yet. ‘I don’t know enough about them but, in my experience, it’s got to either be about sex or money.’
I grinned at him. ‘Have you ever thought about becoming a detective, Diego? That sounds like a very profound statement.’
At that moment, the door behind him opened and Mary came out.
While Diego was pouring her what looked like a shot of brandy, I reflected on what he’d just said.
Certainly sex had raised its head on numerous occasions during the questionable careers of a number of the guests, but what about money?
I was assuming that they all had more than enough, but what I consider to be enough money and what Hollywood moguls consider enough are two different things entirely.
Who was likely to gain by the deaths of Alice and Sloane?
I decided that I would spend time this afternoon trawling the Internet in the hope of discovering the financial circumstances of all the guests.
Mary came over to me and received a warm welcome from Oscar. She was looking very emotional, and, from what I could see, she’d recently been crying. She took a mouthful of her brandy and grimaced. I seized on that as an intro.
‘Don’t like the cognac?’
She shuddered. ‘I never normally drink anything like this, but I felt I needed something.’ She sounded quite breathless, and I was genuinely concerned for her.
‘Are you feeling all right? Come and sit down.’ I led her over to a nearby table.
Oscar, already on the case, immediately sat down alongside her and put a reassuring paw on her thigh.
She reached down to catch hold of it, and I tried to offer some support of my own.
‘I’m afraid murder’s never pretty, and two in the space of a few hours is bound to be upsetting. ’
Her response came as a surprise. ‘It’s not the murders.’ She stopped and corrected herself. ‘I mean, yes, of course they’re horrific, but it’s not that. I’ve been talking to Miss Graceland, and she’s told me something that I’m finding really hard to process.’
‘Bad news?’
‘No, not bad, definitely not bad. Just mind-blowing.’
I sat back and waited, deliberately giving her time to marshal her thoughts. Finally, she looked up from Oscar straight at me, her eyes wide with disbelief. ‘She’s just told me that I’m her daughter.’
‘Her daughter?’
My immediate reaction was one of astonishment, but then in its wake came the realisation that something that had been quietly ticking away in the back of my mind had been revealed as fact, not conjecture.
Suddenly, Alice’s alleged freak-out and disappearance for a whole year after the break-up with Dirk Foster a quarter of a century ago was explained – but hadn’t Mary told me her parents had been an Italian mother and an English father?
Unless…? I tried to be as diplomatic as possible.
‘But your mum and dad? You were brought up in England, weren’t you?’
I had to wait quite a while before Mary replied, her voice hoarse with emotion.
‘My mum and dad – and I always thought of them as my mum and dad – adopted me as a teeny tiny baby. I was only six days old, and they looked after me and loved me all my life.’ Tears were now running down her cheeks, but she let them run.
‘When I was eighteen, my mum broke the news to me that I’d been adopted and she offered to show me my birth certificate, but I told her I didn’t want to know.
As far as I was concerned, she was my mum, not some woman who’d abandoned me as a newborn baby.
’ She stopped to take another sip of the cognac, but she hastily put the glass down again in disgust and wiped her hand across her mouth.
‘Dad died three years ago, and my mum died this Easter, and I thought that was it. I thought I was all alone in the world, and now this…’
At this point, Oscar took matters into his own paws, stood up on his hind legs and reached up to kiss her cheek – well, actually more of a slobbery lick.
This simple act of affection was all it needed, and floods of tears came pouring out in earnest. I went across to where Diego was looking most concerned and asked for a glass of water.
As he handed it to me, I gave him a little smile and told him not to worry, Mary was going to be okay.
I picked up a handful of paper napkins and went back over to her, glad that none of the guests had decided to put in an appearance yet.
I pressed the napkins into Mary’s hands, set the water down in front of her and waited.
It took several minutes, but she finally managed to regain a semblance of control, wiped her eyes and face and took a big mouthful of water.
I looked across and gave her a reassuring smile. ‘Feeling a bit better?’ She gave me a little nod of the head and a hint of a smile so I went on. ‘What about Miss Graceland? How’s she handling this?’
Mary wiped a napkin across her face again.
‘She’s inside, crying her eyes out. She broke the news to me half an hour ago, maybe an hour ago, and she’s been crying ever since.
’ She sniffed and wiped her face again. ‘And so have I.’ She looked across the table at me.
‘I don’t think either of us really know why we’re crying. I’m just so confused.’
I could well believe it. I glanced at her as she returned her attention to Oscar, catching his head between both her hands and kissing him on the nose.
I decided that this wasn’t the moment to tell her that he used that nose for all sorts of far less hygienic activities and did my best to offer moral support.
‘Of course you’re confused, anybody would be. Just give it time, and let it sink in.’
I wondered whether she had already worked out what this meant as far as her real father was concerned.
By the sound of it, she wasn’t the only one who was going to get a shock.
I found myself wondering how Dirk Foster would handle this bombshell.
My thoughts shifted to Alice, and I wondered why she had decided to seek out the baby she’d given up all those years ago.
The significance of her words to me about Dirk Foster – ‘He didn’t only break my heart; he scarred me for life, mentally and emotionally’ – was now revealed.
Presumably, she had offered Mary a job as a means of getting her close, but I wondered why she’d taken six weeks to break the news to her and why she’d chosen today of all days for such an explosive revelation.
Feelings and emotions have never been my strong points – ask my ex-wife or Anna – but I felt sure that in this case, there was one course of action that Mary really should be following. I leant towards her.
‘Miss Graceland… your mother is in there on her own, crying. You’re out here, crying. Don’t you think it might be better if you went back to her? You both have a lot to talk about, and the sooner you get started, the better.’
Mary nodded slowly, gently lifted Oscar’s paws off her lap and stood up. She then came around to my side of the table and kissed me on the cheek. ‘Thank you, Dan. You’re right.’ And she went back over to the house and disappeared inside.
Diego was still looking at me with an expression of considerable curiosity on his face, but I decided that it would be down to Alice and Mary to tell him what had just transpired.
I gave him a little wave, picked up my mug of beer and went back to my room, where I opened my laptop and set about investigating the financial status of the various guests.
Without the resources of the police behind me, I was unable to access bank details of the guests, and most of my information had to come from reading press releases and articles in the various industry journals.
What emerged was that I’d been right in my supposition that all of them – including Alice – were doing very well indeed, except for one.
As his girlfriend had hinted, Freddie Baker needed money – not pocket money, but serious cash.
He had a magnificent-looking villa in Beverly Hills and clearly more than enough money to allow him to fly across the world and rent what was probably a very expensive speedboat here in Venice, but what he needed was hefty financial backing to allow him to carry on making his movies.
Probably unwisely, he had set up his own production company earlier this year and rumours were swirling around that it was close to insolvency.
It was pretty clear that his prickly personality, as described by Antoinette, and as witnessed by Giulia and me, had alienated any number of possible financiers and he was apparently floundering, desperately seeking the many millions needed to make his new movie.
In particular, it appeared that he was being blocked by a shadowy, but very influential, organisation referred to in several of the more sensationalist trade papers as ‘the Bloc’.
As far as I could tell, this was a cartel of media millionaires and billionaires, without whose backing it was almost impossible for an independent filmmaker to get the necessary money to go ahead.
The problem from my point of view was that, however strapped for cash Baker’s company might be, I couldn’t see how this could have produced a motive for murder.
Maybe Diego’s other suggestion was the right one, and the origin of the murders was sex after all.
The damage that Alice’s autobiography could do to the reputations of some very powerful people had brought one of them here intent of silencing her for good.