Page 24 of Murder in Portofino

‘In what way?’

‘I have a horrible feeling he might have discovered that somebody’s been fleecing the company and that person, whoever it was, decided to silence him.’

I took a few moments to digest what I’d just heard. This could potentially add a different dimension to the whole case, but I still tried to distance myself from the official investigation as far as anybody on the Regal Princess was concerned. ‘I happened to bump into the Carabinieri lieutenant this afternoon and he told me he was coming out to the yacht to do some more interviews. Have you seen him and did you tell him this?’

‘Yes, I’ve seen him, but no, I didn’t tell him, because I thought it was just too awful to contemplate.’

‘So why involve me now?’

‘After he left, I needed to talk to somebody about this so I took Tamsin into my confidence, and she told me I really needed to speak up. I was wondering whether maybe you could be persuaded to come and investigate my suspicions before we get the UK police involved. In the meantime, I’d be grateful if you’d go to the lieutenant and tell him about my concerns in case this might influence his investigation. You can say that I’m happy – well, not happy, but you know what I mean – to tell him all about it but, as you can imagine, I’m just concerned that if my accusations turn out to be groundless, I may have endangered my career. You can probably imagine how you would feel if one of your colleagues accused you of embezzlement, let alone murder.’

‘Yes, indeed. Do you have a particular person in mind as a suspect?’

There was a pregnant pause before he replied, his voice barely audible now. ‘I wouldn’t like to accuse anybody unjustly, but there are only very few people with access to the company’s affairs who could have been able to take the money.’

‘And are these people on the boat with you now?’

I swear I heard him gulp. He then cleared his throat before replying tersely, ‘Yes.’

‘All of them?’

‘Yes.’

I did a bit of quick thinking. It was five-thirty now and I would be meeting the lieutenant at seven. The complication, of course, was that Anna would be with me and I had promised to devote myself solely to her from now on. The fact was, however, that this was a murder case. I knew that this was serious enough for me to have to override any sensitivities Anna might have. I told myself I could have a couple of minutes at the beginning of the evening passing on this information to the lieutenant and then he could decide what steps, if any, he wanted to take. ‘Okay, Mr Vaughan, thanks for telling me this. I need to speak to my girlfriend to see whether I have time to get involved with the investigation, but I’ll certainly get a message to the lieutenant. Don’t worry, I’m sure he’ll handle it sensitively and you don’t need to be afraid. As far as my involvement is concerned, I’ll get back to you if you give me your number.’

He sounded relieved, gave me his phone number and thanked me profusely. When the call ended, I relayed the gist of the conversation to Anna and she nodded a couple of times – not so much in agreement as in resignation. She made no direct comment but I thought I might just have caught a low murmur of, ‘Here we go again.’

14

MONDAY EVENING

We took the ferry back from Santa Margherita to Portofino just before seven after I’d had a chance to try to convince Anna that I wasn’t going to get involved, and that this was now all going to be handled by the Carabinieri. I told her that all I was going to do was to act as an intermediary, relaying the message from Vaughan to the lieutenant, and then I would wash my hands of the whole affair. In spite of my best efforts, she didn’t look convinced, and equally worrying was the fact that Oscar didn’t look convinced either. Dumb animal he may be, but that nose of his doesn’t miss much.

La Conchiglia, the shell restaurant, was a two-minute walk from the Carabinieri barracks and when I gave the lieutenant’s name, a friendly looking woman sitting at a table on the terrace jumped to her feet and held out her hand towards us.

‘Good evening. You must be Guido’s friends. I’m Marina, his wife. He’s just called me to say he’s been held up but he’ll be here in five minutes.’ She gave us a little smile. ‘Knowing him, that may well turn out to be ten minutes or more, but he promises he’s coming.’

We all shook hands and sat down. Oscar went over to make friends with Marina, and Anna was soon telling her about her work at the university in Florence. It turned out that Marina was a teacher of history at the liceo in Rapallo and they discovered that they had a lot in common – not just being unfortunate enough to be partnered with detectives.

In the end, it was almost twenty minutes before the lieutenant arrived, sounding most apologetic. ‘I’m so sorry to be late, but a Greek sailor and a Turkish sailor from two different yachts decided to get very drunk and restage the Trojan war down at the harbour. I’ve just been dealing with them. Too much wine, I’m afraid.’ He pulled out his chair but before sitting down, he glanced down at the table. ‘Talking of wine, I can’t see any on the table. Are you just drinking water? I need to sort that out straight away.’

He turned and headed through the door into the restaurant, so I got up and followed him. As Anna and Marina were still happily chatting, and Oscar was fully engaged in begging for breadsticks from the soft-hearted Marina, I thought this might be the perfect opportunity to talk shop without disturbing the two women. Inside, I found the lieutenant being embraced by the owner, a jovial man with a fine restaurateur’s stomach. The lieutenant – ‘Call me Guido’ – introduced me and we discussed the choice of wine. The owner told us he’d just taken delivery of a few dozen bottles of white from a new producer near Bolgheri in southern Tuscany and he insisted on opening one and filling three glasses so we could taste it before making a decision. It was excellent and Guido asked him to put a bottle on the table for us. When the padrone went off to organise the wine, I took Guido to one side and related what Neil Vaughan had told me. He listened intently before responding.

‘That could well be very interesting. We’re getting absolutely nowhere with Mario Fortunato and I’ve got the Libyan embassy – and the public prosecutor – on my back to either charge or release the two Libyan nationals. Fortunato has been steadfast in denying he could possibly have participated in murder and, without proof, I’m not sure there’s much more I can do to link him to the murder. Mind you, I won’t be releasing him. There’s the little bag of weed found in the cabin, but that’s hardly a criminal offence these days, but, of course, we can get him for possession of contraband arms. The thing is, I’d love to get him for something bigger.’

‘Did you get any joy out of the people on the Regal Princess this afternoon?’

He shook his head. ‘Not much. I interviewed Schiller, the crewman who was on anchor watch the night of the murder, and he stuck to his story of not having seen or heard anything apart from the dinghy leaving but, just like Veronese said, I thought he was acting a bit suspiciously. I’m at a loss to think of any reason he might have had to murder one of the guests, but I’m certainly not ruling him out for now. The woman, Susie Upton, struck me as pretty straight but, given her profession as a television performer, maybe it was just a good act. I tried pressing her on whether the murder victim had made inappropriate advances towards her in return for promotion and she denied it most forcefully, insisting that she would never have stooped to anything as base as that. The other comedian, Martin Grey, came across as very full of himself and decidedly slippery, but he still totally denies having had anything to do with the murder, although it sounds as though the big argument that night did involve him. When I pressed him about his allegations of something going on between Susie Upton and the victim, he started backtracking, so maybe it was just a story he made up like Anna’s friend on the yacht said.’

‘And the other men on the Regal Princess? Are they still not admitting to having been involved in the Lucca restaurant conversation I overheard?’

‘Absolutely not. I couldn’t even get a hint of anything suspicious from any of them except for Edgar Beaumont. You were pretty sure about him being one of the people you heard but he still denies it, but there’s something about him that makes me think he’s lying. The trouble is that I know, just like he knows, that there’s nothing more I can do without finding the man he was talking to. Just to make matters worse, the Coastguard radar trackers have now informed us that there were actually as many as seven vessels in the area that night that might have passed close to Fortunato’s boat. The problem we face is that we have no evidence against any of them so we can’t stop and search all those boats – there would be one hell of an uproar.’

He drained the last of the wine from his glass and set it down on the bar before reaching over and clapping me on the shoulder. ‘You have at least one small success to your name. I got the purser – in the strictest confidence – to check the steak knives, and he confirms that, instead of having the full two dozen, they now only have twenty-three. Not that this helps us a lot as it’s without doubt lying somewhere at the bottom of the sea now, but it does increase the likelihood of the murderer being on the yacht. All we can do is keep trying, can’t we? What about you? Are you going to take on the case of the missing money? If you want to start questioning people on board the yacht, I’m going to hold it until tomorrow late afternoon, but then I’ll have to let them go.’

I found myself in a really difficult position. Every investigative bone in my body was telling me that I couldn’t let a murderer get away scot-free. If it wasn’t Fortunato or his friends, I was now ever more convinced that the killer was to be found on the Regal Princess and yet here I was, about to walk away from the investigation. And that didn’t sit well with me.

Of course, any intervention by me was complicated by the presence of my girlfriend sitting outside on the terrace talking history with Guido’s wife. Anna had been feeling justifiably miffed that our relaxing long weekend away together had turned into more of a busman’s holiday for me and, in consequence, a frustrating one for her. I owed it to her to turn the job down and stick by her side even though Neil Vaughan’s telephone call had now handed me a golden opportunity to get back on board the yacht and start asking questions of my own. The problem was how Anna might react if I went down that road and, to make matters worse, she had an important meeting in Florence the following afternoon so I was up against it from a time point of view. Before I could give Guido an answer, I felt his hand, still on my shoulder, give me a reassuring squeeze before he released his hold.

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