‘She’s a friend, and I had coffee with her yesterday. I used to be acommissarioin the police myself.’ I didn’t mention in which force. Sensing that I was getting through to him, I did my best to offer him a face-saving way out. ‘The fact is that things here have been very fraught, and I have good reason to believe that foulplay may have been involved.’ I gave him a little smile. ‘I’m sorry, I probably should have told you that earlier.’
He nodded a couple of times before turning to the other two officers. ‘Pavan, Piave, stay here and make sure nobody touches a thing, while I call the station.’ He walked off, reaching for his phone.
I went over to where Alice was still sitting motionless and I leant against the table in front of her. I’d been speaking in Italian with the police and so she probably hadn’t understood what had been said. Indeed, most probably few, if any, of the guests would have understood either, so I raised my voice a bit when I spoke to her, ensuring that the others would hear.
‘The sergeant is going to phone the police station so that a more senior officer can be sent out to take charge. I imagine that a forensic team will come at the same time, and we should find out before too long the exact cause of Lucy’s death. We probably all know that she had a drug problem so it might be an accidental, or even a deliberate, overdose, but we have to face the fact that it’s possible that she’s been murdered. I’m afraid this is probably going to mean that everybody here on the island, including you and me, Alice, will have to be interviewed, and the police will probably want to take our fingerprints and maybe even DNA samples for exclusion purposes. I have a feeling it might turn out to be a long night.’
Alice slowly looked up from Oscar at her feet, and I could see the anguish in her face. ‘What you’re saying, Dan, is that if she was murdered, it must have been one of us who did it.’
I tried to play this down for now, although the exact same thoughts were running through my head. ‘Not necessarily, but don’t let’s get ahead of ourselves. We should let the police and the forensic people do their work first, and then we’ll know better.’
‘And if she was murdered, it was because of my stupid game,and poor Lucy was killed by mistake, and it’s my fault. There’s no doubt in my mind that I was the target. Whoever did this to Lucy was trying to killme, and what worries me most of all is whether they’ll try again.’
There was a muted chorus of dissenting voices as a few people did their best to reassure her that she had nothing to worry about but, deep down, I felt sure that she was right.
Valentina and Gabriella emerged from the kitchen with trays of strong coffee, and I helped myself to one while unobtrusively studying the faces around me. Apart from the serving staff, I counted Alice and ten guests – Dirk Foster hadn’t returned after storming off – plus Mary and the six actors engaged for the game. For now, I mentally discounted the actors because I was at a loss to think of what possible motive any of them might have had to murder Lucy O’Connell. I also sidelined Mary, Valentina, Diego and their children for the same reason.
This left me with Alice herself – although at this stage, I had no idea why she might have wanted to kill Lucy – and her guests, few, if any, of whom could have realised that the woman in Alice’s costume had in fact been Lucy. From what I’d seen over the last twelve hours, Alice certainly wasn’t flavour of the month with a number of these, but the question was whether one of them might have decided to take the radical step of trying to kill her. As far as I could tell at the moment, the only guests not out for Alice’s blood were probably Rocco Gentile, Sandra Groves – although she hadn’t exactly sounded enchanted to be here – Antoinette Latour and Greg Gupta. This left me with six possible suspects here, plus Dirk Foster, who had gone off in a huff.
These were Desmond Norman, the all-powerful producer, Jack Sloane, the casting director, Maggie McBride, the widowed billionaire producer, Carlos Rodriguez, the famous director, Alastair Groves, the theatrical agent, and Freddie Baker, the new-kid-on-the-block director. I had seen all of them react angrily – or at least suspiciously – at what Alice had written on their cards, except for Freddie Baker. I hadn’t observed his reaction but I had sensed a certain degree of antipathy between him and Alice when he’d first appeared in the dining room at lunchtime. According to Diego, Dirk Foster and Desmond Norman had crossed swords with Alice after lunch, and her deliberate choice to make Foster the murderer and to spell out in her summing-up the way his Renaissance character had betrayed hers had led to him going off. As a result, I tended to position him high up on my list of suspects, with Norman not far behind.
My thoughts were interrupted as Dirk Foster reappeared on the terrace, changed back into his everyday clothes, with his suitcase in one hand. He ignored Alice completely, spotted Diego and waved to summon him. ‘I need to get off this island. I want you to take me across to the old town or the mainland. Right now!’ He was still looking and sounding furious. I saw the two police officers eyeing each other. I wondered how much English they understood, and if they had already recognised him as the world-famous star he was, but it was clear they were unsure what his intentions were. I hurried across to put Foster in the picture.
‘I’m afraid you aren’t going anywhere, Mr Foster. None of us are.’ I pointed across to the two police officers. ‘Lucy O’Connell’s dead.’
This stopped him in his tracks, and he dropped his suitcase onto the ground with a thud. ‘Lucy dead? But how…?’
I told him briefly that a police investigation would establish the cause of death and that it was uncertain at this stage whether we were looking at an accident, suicide or murder. ‘I’m afraid we’ll all have to stay here at least for tonight. A senior police officer is coming out to the island now, and I imagine he or she will want to take statements from everybody.’
He stared at me blankly for a couple of seconds. ‘Did you say murder? Do the police think she was murdered? And if so, who by?’ He looked and sounded convincing, but I couldn’t help reminding myself that he also was a very good actor. Besides, was his bewilderment because he had just discovered that he had killed the wrong woman? I told him how Alice had swapped costumes with the victim and so maybe Alice had been the intended victim, and his tanned face paled visibly. He pulled out a chair and sat down heavily, waving vaguely towards Valentina and muttering, ‘Coffee.’
I left him to his coffee and went over to explain to the two police officers that Foster hadn’t been present when the victim’s death had been discovered, so this had apparently come as a very unwelcome surprise to him. I stood alongside them for a minute or two, studying the crime scene. The impact of the victim’s head on the table had tipped over a glass and a wine bottle, and a trail of red wine showed the track of the bottle as it had rolled off the table to smash on the ground by Lucy’s feet. The overturned glass still had a little puddle of red wine left in it, and I felt sure that this would be worth careful investigation. There was one other wine glass on the table, but it was empty, and in front of the body were the remains of a half-eaten bowl of the excellent fruit salad Valentina had prepared as a healthy alternative to the no fewer than three different cakes, tarts and puddings she had served as dessert. If I’d been the investigating officer, I would have directed Forensics to study the fruit salad most carefully as well as the wine residue.
A matter of minutes later, the next wave of police officers arrived, and this time, I was secretly pleased to see it headed by Inspector Giulia Trevisan, with the sergeant by her side. She was accompanied by half a dozen other officers, some already wearing forensic overalls, and it looked as though they were nowgiving Lucy’s death the serious investigation it merited. When the sergeant led the inspector over to me, she held out her hand. I shook it but, before she could say anything, I was determined to get in a few words first.
‘Good evening, Inspector. It’s good to see you again, but it’s a pity about the circumstances.’ I used the polite form of the pronoun ‘you’, although she and I had happily used the familiar form the previous day. ‘I fully understand that, like everybody else here on the island, if it turns out to be murder, I’m a potential suspect, so if you want me to retreat into the background, just say the word.’
She gave me a little smile. ‘Let’s wait until we know one way or the other, Dan. In the meantime, there’s no need for you to be so formal.’ To make the point, she was using the familiar form of ‘you’. ‘While the pathologist and his team get on with their work, why don’t we find somewhere we can sit down, and you can tell me what you meant when you told Sergeant Scarpa that things here on the island had been “fraught”?’
I led her and the sergeant along the terrace until we came to a couple of benches positioned outside the greenhouse, a fine old-fashioned, cast-iron lamp illuminating our surroundings. We sat down opposite each other and I didn’t waste any time.
‘The island belongs to Alice Graceland and the victim’s name is Lucy O’Connell.’ I saw recognition on the faces of both officers. ‘That’s right, two of the biggest stars in the movie business. Lucy O’Connell had gone downhill fast in the past few years and I’m almost certain she was a long-term drug addict, so it’s very possible, as the sergeant quite rightly pointed out, that her death has been the result of an overdose. However, the situation here on the island has been awkward, to say the least, for completely different reasons.’
I went on to give them a breakdown of what I’d learned overthe last twenty-four hours, particularly Alice’s intention to confront the people featured in her autobiography, against whom she bore a grudge. I ran through the list of guests, actors and staff here on the island, and both officers made copious notes as I provided a brief description of each of the guests. Giulia Trevisan whistled under her breath as I reeled off their job titles.
‘Wow, it sounds like we have half the movers and shakers in Hollywood here. When the media get wind of this – and I’ll do everything I can to see that they don’t – there’s going to be all hell to pay.’ She gave me a helpless smile. ‘By which I mean that Scarpa and I are going to have our superiors breathing down our necks.’ She glanced across at him. ‘Thank God you’ve done everything by the book so far.’
The sergeant shot me a sheepish look, and I gave him a smile and a wink in return, before continuing with my account of tonight’s murder mystery. I started by mentioning the cards handed out by Alice that had caused such outrage among at least some of the guests. I related what Alice had said about the character played by Dirk Foster in the murder mystery and his incandescent reaction, and she immediately instructed the sergeant to collect all the cards, making a careful note of which had been given to whom, and she added a direct command.
‘First things first, Scarpa, I want you to make sure that every officer, every paramedic, the doctor, any sailors or crew, all get the message that anything or anybody they’ve seen here tonight is strictly classified information. If anybody so much as mutters a word about who’s here on the island, I’ll see that they regret it. Make sure that the message is understood. I mean it. Not a word to anybody.’
As the sergeant jumped to his feet, a thought occurred to me. ‘How’s your English, Sergeant? Would you like me to give you a helping hand?’
He shook his head. ‘My English isn’t too good, but it should be sufficient for this. Thanks for the offer but, if need be, I can ask one of the serving staff to help me with the translation.’
After he’d disappeared along the terrace, Giulia leant forward towards me. ‘Thanks for making sure Scarpa called me in. With big names like these involved, this case is going to come under a lot of scrutiny.’
I smiled back at her. ‘No problem. The thing is, the sergeant might well be right about it being an overdose, but with all the background jealousies and anger bubbling away here, I felt it was better to be safe than sorry. By the way, you told me your English wasn’t particularly fluent, so if you’d like me to help with interpreting, I’m at your service.’
