Paganini's Ghost Read online

  There are rewards in being a child prodigy, but it is not a life I would wish on anyone, and it is probably not a life many children would choose for themselves if they weren’t forced into it by an ambitious parent. And there is usually a pushy mother or father in the background somewhere. Most children do not willingly practise a musical instrument for the many hours a day required to reach a virtuoso standard. I know this from my own three, all of whom learned instruments, and all of whom resisted my attempts to persuade them to practise. I was not inclined to force them and I never had any doubts that that was the right course of action to take. Music should be a pleasure, not a chore. I have seen too many disillusioned, embittered professionals to want my children to become like them. Yevgeny was not yet disillusioned—he was, after all, a prizewinning soloist with a glittering career ahead of him—but he clearly had regrets and was beginning to wonder what he had missed out on for all those years.

  “Maybe you should slow down a bit,” I said. “Do something else as well as music.”

  He smiled ruefully.

  “Slow down? My mother, she never allow it. I just win the Premio Paganini. My life, it will get faster and faster. Lots of people already invite me to play. Mama says I must say yes to them all.”

  “You’re no longer a child, Yevgeny,” I said. “You can make your own decisions now.”

  He looked at me thoughtfully. Then he nodded and started to say something, but the words were cut off by a sudden shout from the terrace. Guastafeste was walking across the lawn towards us. His mobile phone was in his hand.

  “I’m sorry, Gianni, I’ve got to go,” he said. “I’ve had a call from the questura.”

  “Bad news?” I said.

  “It’s François Villeneuve—Vincenzo Serafin’s friend from Paris. He’s been found dead in his hotel room. And he didn’t die of natural causes.”

  Five

  Murder investigations are usually so time-consuming and absorbing that Guastafeste effectively disappears from my life for several days, sometimes several weeks, on end. I was therefore surprised to get a phone call from him the following morning. I was in my workshop, cutting out the front plate for a new violin from a two-piece sheet of spruce.

  “Are you busy?” he asked.

  “Nothing that can’t wait,” I replied.

  “I need your help. Can I come out and see you?”

  “Of course. But what about the Villeneuve case? Aren’t you working on that?”

  “This is to do with the case,” he said.

  Twenty minutes later, I heard his car pull into the drive, the tyres crunching on the gravel. I put down my saw, removed my apron, and went out onto the terrace to meet him. He was unshaven and bleary-eyed. His clothes looked as if he’d slept in them, though—from past experience—I knew he’d probably been up most of the night. As one of the senior detectives at the questura he’d have borne the brunt of the homicide enquiry, working flat out during those first few hours, while the trail was still fresh.

  “Coffee?” I said. “You look as if you could use one.”

  “Thanks.”

  We went into the kitchen and I filled the espresso pot and put it on the stove. Guastafeste sat down at the table. He rubbed the dark shadow along his jawline and yawned.

  “You want to borrow a razor?” I asked.

  “I’ll stick with the designer stubble for the moment.”

  “When we’ve finished, you can come into the workshop and sand down some maple for me with your chin.”

  He gave a lopsided grin.

  “You wouldn’t like the finish. It’d be too rough.”

  I took a couple of coffee cups out of a cupboard and put them on the table.

  “So what about Villeneuve?” I said. “What happened to him?”

  “He was hit over the head. There was blood, as well as a few hairs, on a table lamp in his room. We haven’t got the forensics back yet, but the lamp was almost certainly the murder weapon.”

  I winced.

  “Poor fellow. You have any leads?”

  “Nothing significant so far. The hotel staff, the other guests, none of them saw or heard anything. Someone obviously came to see him. It looks as if they had an argument or a fight—there were signs of a struggle in the room—then the visitor, whoever it was, picked up the table lamp and hit Villeneuve over the head with it. The pathologist who did the autopsy said Villeneuve had unusually thin skull plates. It wouldn’t have taken much of a blow to kill him.”

  “This was when, exactly—yesterday afternoon?”

  “The doctor puts the time of death as yesterday morning, between ten A.M. and noon.”

  “But you weren’t called until—what time was it? Five-thirty, six o’clock?”

  “That’s when the body was discovered. There was a DO NOT DISTURB sign on the door, so the hotel cleaning staff didn’t go in yesterday morning. It was only when Villeneuve’s wife phoned the duty manager from Paris later in the day that anyone went to check the room. She’d been trying to reach her husband all day, on both his mobile and the hotel land line. She was worried. The manager used his pass key to open the door, and he found Villeneuve on the floor.”

  Guastafeste yawned again. I studied his haggard face.

  “Have you had breakfast?”

  “No,” he said. “But, Gianni, you don’t need to—”

  “Someone has to look after you,” I said, interrupting him. “If you won’t do it yourself.”

  I found bread and butter and apricot jam and placed them in front of him.

  “There is always time for a proper breakfast,” I said, aware that I sounded like a bossy parent. But I knew Guastafeste would take no notice if I didn’t insist. He is in his mid-forties, twenty years younger than I am, and sometimes I worry about him as if he were my son. He’s lived alone for several years since his divorce, and his irregular working hours and careless lifestyle have taken a toll on his health. Police work is stressful. The least I could do was ensure he fed himself properly.

  Guastafeste sighed. He spread butter and jam on a slice of bread and ate it. I poured coffee into our cups and sat down at the table with him.

  “You said that you needed my help.”

  Guastafeste felt in the pocket of his jacket and brought out a small transparent plastic bag, about fifteen centimetres square. I saw from the official stamp along the bottom that it was a police evidence bag. Guastafeste placed the bag on the table and turned it round so that I could see clearly what was inside—a small fragment of sheet music.

  “We found this in Villeneuve’s wallet,” he said. “People don’t usually carry bits of music round with them, so it intrigued us. The name of the piece and that of the composer are missing. Your knowledge of music is immense. Do you have any idea what it is?”

  I peered more closely at the bag. The fragment of music was roughly square in shape, with one straight edge and three jagged edges where it had been torn off a larger sheet of paper. It was obviously the top left-hand corner of a piece of classical music, but the title and composer had been left behind with the remainder of the page.

  Only the opening two bars of the piece were there. It was a single stave of music, so it wasn’t for a keyboard instrument. It had a treble clef, the time signature 4/4, key signature of three flats, and the tempo marking adagio. I pitched the notes in my head and hummed them silently—crotchet G, double-dotted crotchet C, semiquaver D, double-dotted crotchet E flat, semiquaver F. That was it.

  “You know what it is?” Guastafeste asked.

  “I need to make sure,” I replied.

  I went through into my back room and played the notes on the piano.

  “Do you recognise it?”

  Guastafeste gazed at me blankly. “Should I?”

  “You heard it very recently. You need more help?”

  “Just tell me what it is, Gianni,” Guastafeste said irritably.

  I pulled out the drawers of one of my many music cabinets and rummaged through the pil
es of sheet music inside until I found what I was looking for—a piece of violin music with piano accompaniment. I discarded the piano score and held out the violin part with the evidence bag alongside it. The fragment of music inside the bag was the same as the opening bars of my own music.

  “It’s even the same Schott edition,” I said. “The ‘Moses Fantasy,’ by Paganini.”

  Guastafeste took the music and the evidence bag from me and made his own comparison.

  “This is one of the pieces Yevgeny Ivanov played on Saturday night.”

  “I said you’d heard it recently.”

  Guastafeste suddenly stiffened. He stared at me, his eyes narrowing, but I could tell his mind was elsewhere.

  “What’s the matter?”

  “Moses,” he said. “Villeneuve had an item in the hotel safe. He deposited it there on Friday evening. A gold box, about the size of a book, only thicker. Looks like an antique to me, well made, expensive. And on the lid of the box is an engraving of Moses on Mount Sinai receiving the tablets bearing the Ten Commandments.”

  “A gold box?” I said. “Is there anything in it?”

  “We don’t know. It has an unusual lock on it. A four-dial combination lock, but instead of numbers on the dials, there are letters.”

  “You’ve attempted to open it?”

  Guastafeste nodded.

  “Just tried a few random combinations. But there are seven letters on each dial. That means probably thousands of different permutations. We’re not going to open it by chance, and we don’t want to force it open.”

  “You think Villeneuve’s murder is linked to this box?”

  “Who knows. It’s the only valuable thing he seemed to have with him. But we haven’t established yet whether he came to Cremona to sell the box, or whether he acquired it here. I spoke to his wife on the phone. She wasn’t much help. She didn’t know anything about the box. She didn’t even know what her husband was doing in Cremona, except that it was a business trip.”

  “What business was he in?”

  “He was a fine-arts and antiques dealer.”

  “How about Serafin? Have you spoken to him?”

  “About an hour ago. He claims to know nothing, either.”

  “You believe him?”

  Guastafeste smiled wryly.

  “You’ve told me enough about Serafin to know not to trust him.”

  “Was he doing business with Villeneuve?”

  “He says not, but”—Guastafeste paused—“I had the feeling he wasn’t being absolutely straight with me.”

  “With Serafin, that’s an easy feeling to get,” I said. “Did Villeneuve deal in violins?”

  “I don’t know. Fine arts and antiques, that’s a pretty broad area, isn’t it? Does Serafin buy and sell only violins?”

  “He’d buy and sell anything if it made him money.”

  I stirred my coffee and took a sip.

  “That fragment of music and this gold box are connected?” I said.

  “Why else would Villeneuve have a corner of the ‘Moses Fantasy’ in his wallet? But connected in what way?” Guastafeste was silent for a moment; then he stood up and began pacing restlessly round the kitchen. “It’s odd, don’t you think? Villeneuve is killed, and in his wallet is a scrap of music that just happens to have been played at a recital he attended the day before. Is that a coincidence?”

  “There’s only one way to find out,” I said.

  We heard the faint sound of a violin being played as we walked along the corridor. I recognised the music immediately—the last, and most famous, of Paganini’s twenty-four caprices, the one on which Brahms, Liszt, and Rachmaninov later wrote variations. We stopped outside the door. Guastafeste didn’t knock immediately. Like me, he was listening to the beautiful sound seeping out from the room. It had a striking quality that made you go still, that made you hold your breath in case you missed a single note. Only when the final chord had been played and there was a moment’s silence did Guastafeste raise his hand and rap on the door.

  Ludmilla Ivanova answered. We’d phoned in advance, so she was expecting us.

  “Buon giorno,” she said in her rich, dark voice, her body filling the doorway. “Come in.”

  She pulled back the door to let us enter. We were in one of the Hotel Emanuele’s larger and more luxurious suites, a spacious sitting room with two bedrooms and two bathrooms off it, all located at the end of a wing, where Yevgeny’s practice wouldn’t disturb the other guests too much.

  Yevgeny was standing by his music stand in the middle of the room. He put down his violin and smiled at us.

  “It is good to see you again,” he said in his accented Italian. “I enjoy our quartets yesterday.”

  “I’m sorry I had to cut them short,” Guastafeste said. “It would have been nice to play more.”

  “You have job to do. I understand,” Yevgeny said. “And a thing like this—a murder—it is important, no?”

  “You cannot have many murders in a place like Cremona,” Ludmilla said.

  “No, they are fairly rare, fortunately,” Guastafeste replied.

  “It was in the newspaper this morning. An antiques dealer from Paris, they said.”

  “That is correct.”

  “Do you know why he was killed?”

  “Not yet.”

  Ludmilla sat down on a chair and crossed her legs, decorously adjusting her dress so that it covered her knees.

  “So, how can we help you?” she asked.

  Guastafeste turned to Yevgeny.

  “Your recital on Saturday evening,” he said. “I know you played from memory, but presumably you have the sheet music with you, as well?”

  “Of course. I always have the music,” Yevgeny said. “To practise from, to . . .” He paused and said something in Russian to his mother.

  “To refresh his memory,” Ludmilla said. “He didn’t know the word in Italian. Yevgeny knows a lot of the repertoire by heart, particularly the big concertos, but he still always travels with the music. For unusual pieces—like Saturday’s programme—pieces he doesn’t play very often, having the music is even more important.”

  “Could we see the music for the ‘Moses Fantasy,’ please?” Guastafeste said.

  “The ‘Moses Fantasy’? Certainly.”

  Yevgeny started towards the corner of the room, where there was an elegant mahogany desk covered with stacks of music. Guastafeste moved swiftly, cutting Yevgeny off before he reached the desk.

  “It’s all right, Signor Ivanov. It’s better if you let me find it.”

  Yevgeny backed off, looking surprised.

  “What? . . . Yes, as you wish.”

  Guastafeste searched through the piles of music, taking care to touch only the edges of each piece, to preserve any fingerprints that might have been present. Then he extracted a double sheet of paper. I could see at once that the top left-hand corner of the first page had been torn off.

  Guastafeste showed the music to Yevgeny, holding it gingerly by the top right-hand corner. Yevgeny stared at the piece, his brow furrowing.

  “But that . . . what happen to it?” he said.

  “When did you last look at this?” Guastafeste asked.

  Yevgeny shrugged.

  “I do not remember. I think Saturday afternoon—when I play through it with pianist.”

  “You haven’t looked at it since?”

  “No.”

  “You didn’t realise the corner was missing?”

  “It was not missing. Not on Saturday.”

  “After you’d played the piece with your pianist, what did you do with the music?” Guastafeste asked.

  “I put it with other music in dressing room.”

  “In the cathedral?”

  “Yes.”

  “You just left it lying about? It wasn’t in a case, or a bag?”

  “It was on chair, I think. Why you interested in my music?”

  Guastafeste removed the plastic evidence bag from his pocket and he
ld it next to Yevgeny’s copy of the “Moses Fantasy.” The jagged edges on the two pieces of paper matched perfectly.

  “Where did you get that?” Ludmilla asked.

  She’d got up from her chair and walked across the room to take a closer look.

  “François Villeneuve had it,” Guastafeste said.

  Ludmilla gaped at him.

  “Villeneuve? The dead man, you mean? But how?”

  “I was hoping you might be able to help me on that,” Guastafeste said.

  “Us? We didn’t know him. We never met him, never even saw him, as far as I’m aware. Yevgeny?”

  Yevgeny shook his head.

  “I never meet him, either.”

  “Yet clearly, at some point, he got hold of your music and ripped the corner off it,” Guastafeste said. “Was your dressing room left unattended at any time on Saturday?”

  “Unattended? I do not understand,” Yevgeny said.

  “Was there always someone in it, or close by?”

  “Let me think. After we come back from Gianni’s, I rehearse a bit more with my accompanist. Then I go to dressing room with music and stay there until concert.”

  “You never left the room?” Guastafeste said.

  “Maybe once, to go to toilet. But insurance company men are there the whole time, standing guard outside. No one could have gone inside room.”

  “What about during the recital? Did the insurance company men stay by the room?”

  “No,” Yevgeny said. “They come with me, out into the cathedral. They are guarding the Cannon, not my music. They stand at side, behind pillar, throughout recital.”