Moretti and Falla Mysteries 2-Book Bundle. Jill Downie
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the whole business. As for the crew, director Mario Bianchi was a prime suspect; he was responsible for the rewrites and he was Italian. And, for the moment, the most likely candidate was Italian. Which would be a great relief to Chief Officer Hanley.
If, that is, he was right about the war and past events being the motive for murder. As Sydney Tremaine had pointed out, there was a lot of volatility on a movie set. It could be that the art director, Piero Bonini, and the co-designer, Eddie Christy, hated Betty Chesler’s guts, and decided to sabotage the project. It could be that anyone hated Gilbert Ensor’s guts and decided to sabotage the project.
Ahead of him, shrouded in a misty grey drizzle, Moretti could see what remained of the Hanois cottages. The lighthouse itself could not be seen from this point, because of the towering granite slab around which the coastal road wound itself, but on that rocky platform, in the days before radio and telephone, the lighthouse keepers’ wives used to send messages to their husbands with flags. Now, the summit was empty, and only traces remained of the massive shelter and the tank traps erected by the occupation forces.
He brought the Triumph to a halt and got out. Because of the miserable weather, the place was deserted and silent, except for the sound of the sea on the rocks below the point. Gulls wheeled overhead, their cries suddenly climaxing in a raucous cacophony, and Moretti could hear the piping shriek of an oystercatcher somewhere, looking for the winkles and barnacles exposed by the low tide. He experienced a moment of suspension in time, as a past embracing all those hundreds of ships lost on the Hanway rocks, the earthworks thrown up and the great guns and powder magazines mounted to fend off Buonaparte on this vulnerable coastline, the debris left behind by a more recent enemy, hung in the swirling fog, tangible as the pebbles beneath his feet. Which past, indeed, did Betty Chesler mean?
“Wharro! Lookin’ for me?”
A small gnome-like creature materialized through the mist in front of Moretti.
“Dan Mahy?”
“Don’t look so surprised, lad. I got second sight, me, but I also got a phone!”
The gnome cackled.
“Can we have a word?”
“Why you came, innit?”
On closer inspection, the gnome was not so small after all. His back was nearly bent double, and his broad-featured face was the colour of mahogany. The weathering of time and climate made it difficult to judge his age, but he appeared to be in his eighties. He took Moretti’s arrival with the calm of one who had faced enough of life’s calamities and contretemps not to find anything extraordinary.
“Mr. Le Page says you’re the one to talk to about the Vannonis at the Manoir Ste. Madeleine.”
“Did he now? That would be because of my missus, God rest her soul.”
“That’s right. She worked there.”
“So she did. Became very friendly with that poor old lady they brought with them.”
“What poor old lady?”
“Patrizia, she was called. Italian, of course, like them. Oh how she wanted to go back again, that one! Didn’t speak much English, but she used to cry about it to my missus, she did. Died here, poor woman. Never got back. Mind you, she told Aggie they could never.”
“Did she say why? I thought they did go back from time to time.”
“Oh, not to Italy, she didn’t mean. She meant to the house and the place where she was born. I know what that’s like.” Dan Mahy looked around him. “Always want to be here, me, and now I got a little windfall, I have.” The old man chuckled and rubbed his hands together with a sound like the rasp of sandpaper. “Put it away in my pied-du-cauche.”
“That’s nice,” said Moretti. “Wouldn’t it be safer in the bank than in the toe of your sock?”
“Huh!” Dan Mahy snorted and spat. “Not for me, and no St. Peter Port, or St. Andrew, no thanks. Social Services keep at me, to get me out. Here, where I was born, this is where I’ll die.”
“So,” said Moretti, gasping hold of the direction of the conversation and wrenching it back to the matter in hand, “Patrizia said they had to leave a house? A place?”
“Right. You’re Emidio and Vera’s boy, aren’t you?” Dan Mahy suddenly said, looking at Moretti as if he had seen him for the first time.
“I am. Now, about the Vannonis and the old lady —”
“But you should know, lad. Your father now — he couldn’t go back, neither, could he?”
“My father?”
Moretti felt as if he had trodden on one of the old fortifications and uncovered a rusty mine beneath the surface. It still happened, from time to time.
“Just like Patrizia used to say about the Vannonis. That she couldn’t talk to anyone about her old home because of the bad things. No one talked about it, the house.”
“What house?” Scramble through it, thought Moretti. Stick with his train of thought, or we’ll both get lost. And at the moment, he seems to know what he’s saying, though God knows what he’s saying.
“She said she always had to remember the bad things didn’t happen. Like they told her.”
“Did she ever tell your wife where this place was in Italy?”
“Don’t remember — like I said, she didn’t speak much English. But Aggie brought old Patrizia out here to visit many times, that I do remember. She’d sit and look at the sea and say the same thing, over and over again. Then one day my missus told them back at the manor. Told them what the old lady had said, asked them what it meant. She never came no more.”
“What was it she said — do you remember?”
Dan Mahy screwed up his eyes and mouth. After a moment he said, “Pretty it was. Stuck in my mind, it did. Let me think — ah, got it. Said she could smell the sea again, that it did her good. Bury the past, she said. Then she said, ‘Maledetta Maremma, maledetta Maremma.’ Chanting, she was, like it was a prayer, over and over.”
“Maledetta Maremma, maledetta Maremma?”
Dan Mahy cackled appreciatively. “That was just like her saying it, ma fé! Just like your dad, you.”
Moretti decided to risk changing direction. “Why, Dan, should I know how Patrizia felt? You say my father could not return to Italy. But he did, from time to time.”
Not often, thought Moretti.
“Well, mon viow, it was more the running away for him, eh? Mind you, lad, there was many of us as would’ve run a mile or two for your mother. Nobody blamed him.”
“Blamed him?”
Suddenly, the old man became a child. “I’m tired. I want my dinner. Fiche le camp, Emidio.”
“Eduardo.”
But Dan Mahy’s moment of sanity — if that indeed was what it had been — was over. He turned on his heel and walked away from Moretti back to the home of his childhood, his oversize boots dragging on the wet road.
“Your eyes betray you, Contessa — I know them so well by now. Tell me where he is. Do not go on with this dangerous game, I beg of you!”
Before the Panavision cameras in the principal reception room of the Manor Ste. Madeleine, Gunter Sachs was sweating heavily, and regretting the self-indulgences of a month in the south of France that had added body fat to burn beneath the great arc-lights that lit the set. Although it was still early in the afternoon, it had already been a long day. Outside, the sun shone on a rain-soaked landscape, but in the manor it was night, blinds and curtains closed over the windows set in the gold-brocaded walls. Mario Bianchi had decided against using available light and had opted to set one of the pivotal dramatic scenes of the book and the movie on a hot July night in 1944 so he could