The Few (40 page)

‘I could have gone to your boss, but I wanted to deal directly with you. I thought it would be cleaner somehow.'

Scamarcio was intrigued by the choice of phrase, but didn't want to distract him. ‘Go on.'

‘There's no easy way to say this, so I'll just come straight out with it. I killed him, you see — trashed his apartment, too.'

Scamarcio felt time stand still. He no longer heard the ticking of the carriage clock on Ganza's desk that he had noticed when he'd first sat down.

‘Are you talking about Arthur?'

‘Yes. You've seen the pictures, I presume?' The tone remained strangely businesslike.

‘Of the two of you at the party? Yes.'

Ganza nodded. ‘I should have told you sooner — I realise that. I just needed some time to get my thoughts together.' Although the delivery was neutral, his hands were trembling slightly.

Scamarcio tried to keep the shock out of his voice: ‘Why did you kill him, Mr Ganza?'

Ganza sank back into his chair, and slid down in it slightly. ‘The shame, I guess. I panicked. I didn't want to lose everything I had, didn't want him to talk, didn't want to see him on some evening chat-show dishing the dirt.' The words made sense, but the tone didn't. Despite the water collecting in the corner of his eyes, Ganza now sounded like he was reciting lines in a play — the emotion was absent.

‘So you just went to his place and stabbed him to death?'

‘Yes.'

‘Why all the chaos?'

‘I wanted it to look like a burglary.'

‘Where was he when you entered the flat?'

‘On the bed.'

‘Awake or asleep?'

‘Asleep.'

‘And you gave him the morphine, too?'

Scamarcio registered an unmistakeable flicker of surprise. Ganza didn't know about the morphine.

He pretended to ignore it and pushed on: ‘So you gave him the morphine?'

‘Yes.'

Scamarcio knew now that he was lying, both about the morphine
and
the murder. But he was at a loss to understand why. If his father and brother were to be believed, Arthur had apparently committed suicide, had finally had enough. So why should Ganza now be trying to take the blame for his death? Was he scared? Was it fear now pushing him towards a prison cell? Were years behind bars preferable to what was waiting for him on the outside? Was he afraid of the same thing as Zaccardo? He sighed quietly, patting his jacket pocket for his cuffs, but realised they were in his car.

‘So I guess I'm going to have to arrest you.' He felt like the other actor in Ganza's little play.

‘I guess so.'

‘I don't have any cuffs with me.'

‘I'll accompany you willingly to the station. We can take my car.'

‘Right you are.'

Scamarcio drained the dregs of his coffee and stood up. They headed back out through the vast polished living room towards the front door.

Ganza stopped in front of him. ‘Can you give me a second? I need to use the bathroom.'

Scamarcio nodded for him to go ahead. He walked on into the lobby area towards the front door, and took in the chandelier, the oil paintings, and the large, lavish black-and-white floor tiles. As he was admiring the decor, he noticed a door ajar to his right. There was a light coming from within, so he stepped a little closer, curious to catch a glimpse inside another of the rooms. But as he drew nearer he realised that Mrs Ganza was standing just beyond the threshold — getting dressed, it seemed. In this light, her profile was even more elegant, her cheekbones higher, her nose more delicate; even if he hadn't known it, he would have been able to tell just by looking at her that she had once been a society girl. He was about to step away, not wanting to be taken for a Peeping Tom, when he noticed something else about her: her left wrist was bandaged, and there was something wrong with the colouring on her right forearm. He drew a little closer, and saw that it was badly bruised — blue and raw-looking. And at that exact moment, she looked up, and their eyes locked. And it was then that he knew it was she who had killed Arthur.

62

AT THE STATION
, Mrs Ganza remained composed and dignified while her husband, left alone for several minutes in an interview room, was racked by sobs, shaking and heaving back and forth — a humiliating spectacle that Scamarcio felt embarrassed to be observing on the monitor. He thought that Ganza should at least be allowed some element of privacy.

Mrs Ganza had told them that she didn't want to wait for her brief and would prefer to push on with the interview until he arrived. Garramone had nodded his assent, so Scamarcio turned the recording device on, duly noting the date and time, and the names of the three individuals present.

‘So, Mrs Ganza, your husband has told us that he's responsible for the death of Arthur Maraquez, also known as José, at his apartment in Trastevere last week …' He was about to ask her what she thought of this, but she was ready with her response.

‘He isn't.'

‘What makes you say that?'

There was silence for several moments before she replied: ‘Because I killed him myself.' The words were flat and cold. There was an icy bitterness in her stare, too — an expression that intimated
What of it? Wouldn't you have done the same in my position?

For a moment, the air seemed to desert the little room.

‘That is not the account you gave me the other day,' said Scamarcio finally.

‘I wasn't ready the other day.' She paused. ‘I had things I needed to get prepared first.'

Scamarcio gave a slight nod. ‘Could you explain what happened — talk us both through it?'

‘He was about to ruin my husband's career, and destroy my family, my reputation, everything we'd worked so hard for.'

‘He wasn't the one who published the photos.'

‘No, but he was in them, and he was the one who had been manipulating him, extorting him, all these years.'

‘Extorting him?'

‘Giorgio had been paying him a small fortune. I saw the money leave his account every month.'

So she
had
known. She'd lied well at their first meeting, thought Scamarcio — very well. Instead, he said: ‘I think you may be confused there, Mrs Ganza. Your husband was being blackmailed for the photos by the man who had taken them.'

She shook her head, looked away for a moment, and bit down on her lip. ‘I'm not confused at all, Detective. I'm not talking about the last few months, but the last few
years.
He's been paying that whore … that creature, that boy, for years. He bought him that flat in Trastevere. You know that? He paid for his flat.'

She barred her arms across her chest, staring him straight in the eye, uncompromising, unflinching, challenging him this time. There was none of the slow tiredness of their previous meeting.

‘So you wanted to put an end to it?'

‘It
had
to end. The photos were the final straw: I wanted Arthur out of our lives. I wanted an end to his games — the exaggerated vulnerability, the false portrait of the perfect companion. I know the score: I know why he went to him — I'm not stupid. So I made a plan to go to his place. But when I got there, he seemed drugged, completely out of it. And it threw me. He was so smashed I even told him what I was about to do to him, and you know how he reacted? He just laughed weirdly and said, “OK, then, do what you must.” Then he did something odd. He staggered over to his camera, smashed it against the wall, and then put it back on the shelf. After that, he just lay back on the bed and waited for me to get on with it.'

She was shaking her head again, uncomprehending. ‘It infuriated me. I had wanted him to suffer, to pay for what he'd done, and the family he'd destroyed, but in the end I don't think he suffered at all. He just made me think I was doing him a favour.'

‘That camera — didn't you want to take it with you?'

She nodded slowly. ‘Yes, because I wondered what was on it and whether it would incriminate my husband.' She paused for a moment, sighing softly. ‘But I made a mistake: I was angry at him, just lying there like that, waiting for me to kill him, so I only thought about the implications of that camera after I'd heard the sirens. I didn't know if they were coming for me, but I couldn't risk it. Maybe a neighbour had heard something, and called the police? I was actually going to go get the camera, but the sirens were getting closer, and I panicked. I felt I had no choice but to get out of there. There was no time to retrieve that camera.' She stopped for a second, searching both their faces. ‘Why, what was on there? Was it important?'

Scamarcio looked away from her, momentarily disgusted.

It was Garramone's turn to speak. He leaned forward slightly, trying to keep his tone neutral. ‘Mrs Ganza, just why are you telling us all this? Why not let your husband take the blame? He's confessed, after all.'

She leaned back in her seat and shifted to the side slightly, her lips stiffening into a bitter smile, contorting her beauty for a moment. ‘Two things: one, his career's already ruined — it's beyond help, and there's nothing I can do about that now; two, I've achieved my secondary objective, which was to make him suffer.'

Garramone frowned. ‘So you wanted to punish him for what he'd done?'

She paused and nodded slowly, not speaking for a moment. Then, almost as an afterthought, she said: ‘I wanted to hurt him like he'd hurt me. He was in love with him, you see, and for me that's a kind of death. Prison makes no difference to me now.'

63

GANZA HAD PLEADED
with them, had said his wife was a manic-depressive who hadn't been taking her lithium — he could produce a doctor's note to prove it. She couldn't go to prison, he insisted; she wouldn't cope. His relentless entreaties made Scamarcio wonder whether Mrs Ganza had in fact underestimated her husband's feelings for her; made him wonder whether it wasn't as simple as him being ‘in love' with Arthur. Ganza claimed to know nothing about ‘last night's party' or why the guests hadn't shown, and insisted that if he did he would have given it up freely — anything that might help lessen the charges facing his wife. But when it came to the wider question of the parties themselves and their regulars, he remained tight-lipped. This was his limit, figured Scamarcio. Fear would stop him from going any further.

Scamarcio left Garramone at the station, wanting to head over to Aurelia at the morgue to run the new scenario past her. But he was aware that it wasn't just her professional opinion he courted. The events in Sicily and Tuscany had left him wrung out, in need of some kind of emotional connection: again that sensation returned, building for several days now, that he needed someone in his life who counted, who he had to be there for and vice versa. Instinctively, he sensed that that person might be Aurelia. If he were honest with himself, he'd been quietly wondering about this for a while now.

When he walked into her office, she was resting her head on her desk, with her arms crossed above her. Somehow it disturbed him. She looked as if she might have been shot.

‘Are you all right?'

She jumped. ‘Oh, Scamarcio! I was just tired, that's all. You caught me napping.' She held up a finger. ‘Whatever you do, don't say you're sorry.'

He raised both palms. ‘Understood. May I sit down?'

‘Help yourself.'

He pulled out a dilapidated plastic chair, and took a deep breath: ‘Any chance we could be dealing with both a murder and a suicide?'

‘Your dead rentboy again?'

He nodded, and talked her through the events of that morning. When he was done, she stood up and walked towards the window, and looked out. Her hair was good in the sunlight, glossy, like something out of one of those TV ads, thought Scamarcio.

‘It's certainly possible that he injected the morphine and then used his last moments of lucidity to position the camera before he was set upon.'

‘Would morphine do that to you? Make you so acquiescent in the face of death, would you just lie there like that and let someone stab you?'

‘Depends on the amount you'd taken, but, given his now supposedly suicidal state, I'd say, yes, it could. And there were no clear defence wounds, as I said.'

‘If Mrs Ganza hadn't come along, what would he have done with that camera, I wonder? Just left it beside his bed to be discovered along with his body?'

‘Seems like it, yes. Was it left running when it was put on the shelf?'

‘The CSIs seem to think so, yes. It looks as if he wanted it to be seen straight away when the body was found. Maybe he hoped an inquiry would start from there.' He checked himself; he'd said too much.

‘Why did he want it to be seen? What was on it?'

Scamarcio remembered that he'd kept the contents of the camera to himself, and had chosen not to divulge them to Aurelia. He wanted to share it with her now, but knew that it would have to keep: he had to wait until all the loose ends were tied up. ‘If you can hold on a couple of days, I'll tell you then. Let me take you for that drink, and I'll fill you in.'