Moretti and Falla Mysteries 2-Book Bundle. Jill Downie
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Got You Under My Skin,” with a pure simple sound that gradually began to swing as the other players took up the harmony and rhythm. As the notes became more intricate, the piano player’s body moved slightly, his hands flying over the keys swiftly and surely, free and yet in control. The buzz of conversation quietened.
When the piece came to an end, the pianist turned to acknowledge the applause with the other players. For a moment he looked almost startled. Then he grinned and reached up for a glass that stood on top of the piano.
“Bello, no?” said Giulia.
“It’s an interesting face,” agreed Sydney. “Lean, and just a tad mean. The camera would love him, I think.”
“Deb tells me he has an interest in the club, and the restaurant upstairs. His father owned them.”
“I heard him speaking Italian this morning.”
“His father was Italian, his mother a Guernsey woman. She rescued him or something, I don’t know. Something to do with the war.”
“It sounds romantic,” said Sydney. The piano player looked up from his keyboard, and at that moment he saw her.
“I think he’s seen me,” she said. “And he’s looking more than a tad mean right now. He’s coming over.”
Detective Inspector Moretti was heading across the room, briefly sidetracked from time to time by friends and well-wishers at intervening tables.
“Ms. Vannoni — Mrs. Ensor —” Moretti turned to Sydney.
“Tremaine,” said Sydney. “Sydney Tremaine.”
“Ms. Tremaine,” said the piano player. Her correction seemed to have annoyed him further. “Your husband has reported you as missing.”
“I’m off-duty, Detective Inspector. Aren’t you? I’m Ms. Tremaine when I’m off-duty, so do I call you Detective Inspector when you’re supposedly off-duty?” I’m already slightly drunk, Sydney thought.
“It doesn’t matter to me. I thought you should know.”
“Thank you. Now I do. He is missing me, but I am not missing him. You can call off the search parties, Detective Inspector Moretti.”
Moretti said nothing more. As he turned to leave, Giulia put a hand on his arm.
“Do you take requests?”
“It depends on the request,” he answered.
“‘Mack the Knife,’” suggested Giulia Vannoni.
Her smile challenged him.
He did not respond, but for a moment Sydney thought the piano player would become the policeman, as his expression moved from annoyed to thunderous. He seemed to be on the verge of saying something, but instead he shrugged off her hand that still held his sleeve, turned away, and went back to the tiny stage. She watched as he said something to the other musicians, sat down at the piano, and started to play.
Why can’t you behave — oh why can’t you behave?
Opposite her, Giulia started to laugh.
“The policeman has a sense of humour. Is there a message for us, do you think?”
“Perhaps he thinks the message was for him. Or maybe it’s just Cole Porter night,” said Sydney.
But Giulia’s flippant request disconcerted her. Was there a message for her, let alone for the policeman-piano-player? Was she being a complete fool? Possibly. In her experience, the only way to blind yourself to sense and sensibility was to get drunk, and it seemed she was not yet drunk enough. She reached across the table for the bottle of wine.
Moretti saw them laughing as they left, arm in arm, and his anger returned. The clear night sky outside the club, the sound of halyards clinking against the masts of the hundreds of boats in the Albert and Victoria marinas, the clean bite of the air usually enhanced the tranquility of mind he found in the smoke-filled, half-lit womb of the jazz club. This time he had taken his preferred escape route, only to find reality there ahead of him.
They stopped to say goodnight to Deb Duchemin at the door, and it looked as if Giulia Vannoni was having to hold her companion up, to keep her on her feet.
He thought of the uncontrollable anger of Gilbert Ensor, of the professional consequences for himself if he walked away — which was what he wanted to do, because he was bloody tired, and the whole point of coming and playing a set with the band was to forget about the case and Sophia Maria Castellani, whoever the hell she was, for an hour or two — and the personal consequences for this silly woman with her luminous good looks and her wasted talents. He followed them into the small, well-lit car park, where Giulia Vannoni had left her pricey Ducati.
“Ms. Vannoni —”
He could see from Giulia Vannoni’s eyes she was not sorry to see him.
“You’re not seriously thinking of putting her on the back of that machine, are you?”
“I was going to get a taxi for her.”
“This is not New York or Rome. You’d have to wait. And Gilbert Ensor is an explosive man, Ms. Vannoni. It would be best if she checked into another hotel for the rest of the night until she has sobered up. I will let her husband know she is safe — I’ll say she was visiting friends.”
“Friends? Here?”
“I’ll come up with something.”
“I understand.” Gently, Giulia Vannoni dis-entangled herself from Sydney Tremaine. “Perhaps it would be better.”
Moretti thought she had fallen asleep. She sat beside him in the Triumph, her head dropped on his shoulder. He felt her shift on the seat, heard her sigh.
“I’m drunk, aren’t I?”
“Yes.”
“What’s your name? I mean, your first name. Detective Inspector is too — difficult, when you’re pissed.”
“Ed, I’m called. My full name is Eduardo.”
“Oh right, Italian. Did you know, Eduardo, that Giulia says I can only learn to read in Florence if I become a nun?” Her voice was completely serious.
“Ah,” said Moretti.
There didn’t seem to be anything else to say.
Chapter Six
The Police Station in Hospital Lane had at one time been the workhouse, although it had never been called that. It was a fine mid-eighteenth-century building, L-shaped around a spacious quadrangle, more reminiscent of an old public school than “La Maison de Charité,” as it had sometimes been known. Hospital Lane itself had once been called Rue des Frères, as the original track had led to the old friary, now Elizabeth College.
The police force had relocated there in the mid-nineties, and Moretti had only worked on the island after the move. As he turned the Triumph into the quadrangle that night, he looked up over the elegant old wrought-iron entrance gate, at the stone bas-relief of a pelican feeding its young with drops of blood from her own breast. The white-painted carving that had in the past given the building its popular nickname, the Pelican, gleamed dimly in his headlights as he went through. In this light, he could not see the drops of blood.
In Moretti's opinion, one of the few pleasures of working at the Hospital Lane headquarters at night — the only pleasure of working at Hospital Lane at night — was the amount of work you could get through. The place was quiet, he could play Peterson or Brubeck or Ellington without interruption on the small stereo he kept at the office, and there were very few distractions, apart from some of his colleagues on night duty who dropped in from time to time to hear what was going on in a murder inquiry that involved the kind of exotica rarely found on the island.
And, on the subject of exotica —