dropping it on the floor at her feet. “I am the fruit, you see? His fruit. It’s so creepy that ‘poetic’ way of talking and thinking. My mother does it, too. Hippies, isn’t that what they were called? But he was wrong about the fruit. The fruit is pure poison, too.”
“I am not following you, Emma.”
“I killed him,” said Emma. “I killed Henry Treacy.”
Chapter 41
As emma pronounced the words, Caterina sat back, only now realizing that she had been leaning forwards and waiting for this confession. She had essentially known it since Emma’s craven boyfriend withdrew his alibi.
Emma continued: “It was an accident. I didn’t even mean to hurt him. He was drunk.”
Caterina believed her at once. She tried to suppress the immediacy of the belief as unbecoming for a police officer, but it simply felt true. The incongruity of Emma killing someone was too great. But it wasn’t just that. Emma’s main concern now did not seem to be to claim innocence for herself, but to confess the reasons for her actions. The girl was telling the truth. She was reliving the moment.
“Henry tried to hug me, and he tried to kiss me, and then he started weeping like a child. It was revolting. The folds in his skin, the bristles, and the smell of beer, wine, urine, and old man’s breath.”
“He tried to assault you?”
“No. Not like that. All evening I had stayed with him waiting for him to reveal this really important thing he said he needed to tell me, but all he did was go on about how beautiful I was. How intelligent, how elegant and perfect until I thought I could take no more. It was so much better when he was sober and ironic, making jokes at my expense. Then we got to that piazza, and he started talking about the self-portrait in his office and asking me what I saw in it. And suddenly he grabbed me and pulled me toward him and he tried to kiss me, not on the mouth, but on the face, on my forehead. I struggled and pushed at him, but he kept begging me to listen to him for a moment, so I told him I would if only he would let me go, which he did.
“ ‘Nightingale thinks I don’t know about you. He thinks he has me fooled and blinded and that I’m no better than a bewildered wreck, which may be true. But I knew who you were even before Nightingale brought you to the gallery with his false provenance stories, pretending he had just happened to find a treasure like you lying about. And he thought I would not see the way he treated you and looked proudly at you, the way his breast puffed up like a pigeon every time he was watching you. Anyone would have noticed how he behaved toward you. His cover story was pathetic.’
“ ‘Is that what you needed to tell me?’ I asked him. ‘Why didn’t you confront Nightingale first? I never saw the need for all the deception.’
“Then Treacy, he gives me a look which… I can’t describe it. Proud and sad at the same time. Partly a leer, partly a look of pity, and he says, ‘John Nightingale is an English cuckold. Three months after he took Angela from me, I went back and took Angela from him, only he never knew it. And I took her back time and time again. Ask her. Ask your mother. John Nightingale is not your father. I am.’
“I think I screamed,” continued Emma. “I pushed him hard. Really hard, in the chest with the heel of my hand. I hit him there three times, and he fell backwards. I heard his head crack against the cobbles, only I didn’t believe then that sound could have been made by his head. I only heard the crack afterwards, thinking back. I hear it now. But at the time I didn’t hear it and Treacy wasn’t even unconscious, because he kept calling my name as I ran away.”
Emma sat with her hands folded in her lap as she spoke, her voice calm. She even gave a deeper and heavier intonation when repeating Treacy’s words, and she would have been a model of perfect composure had it not been for the tears on the sides of her face.
Caterina thought of the handsome fair-haired youth that sat above Treacy’s desk in the gallery, and wondered how neither Emma nor Nightingale had ever seen the likeness. She wondered how Emma’s mother could have hidden the story from her daughter all these years, and why.
Emma asked for the bathroom and when she came back she had washed her face clean. She went back to the chair, picked up her purse, and pulled out her BlackBerry and showed it to Caterina, saying, “Look. It’s switched off. That way she can’t call me and the Colonel can’t find me.”
“So your mother can’t call you?” said Caterina. She did not bother mentioning that Emma would need to remove the batteries, too, if she didn’t want to be traced.
“I need to find a place to stay,” said Emma. “But where? With my lying mother, my pathetic boyfriend Pietro…”
“What about your own place?” said Caterina.
“The apartment paid for by the gallery? In other words, by my dead father and my ex-father or whatever I am supposed to call them. I’m not going there.”
“Sooner or later you are going to have to talk to them about it.”
“Why should I? My mother didn’t tell Nightingale, Nightingale thought he was fooling Treacy. I kill Treacy, and now it’s up to me to stage some sort of family reconciliation? Nightingale, Treacy. I don’t even use their first names.”
“Emma, if you say once more that you killed him, if you indicate to me that what you did was deliberate, I will arrest you now and have you taken to the station to be charged.”
Emma looked at Caterina in shock.
“So, tell me, did you deliberately kill Treacy?”
Emma shook her head. “No. I… no. I was just clearing space between us… no.”
“Did you think he was badly hurt when you ran away?”
“I didn’t care.”
“I repeat: Did it occur to you that he might be badly hurt?”
Emma closed her eyes and let out a long breath. “No. It did not. I have never hurt anyone physically in my life. I had no idea it could be so easy.”
“People are frail,” said Caterina. “Even so, you withheld vital information from us when we arrived the following day, and that is an offense with which you will be charged. But we can do that tomorrow some time.”
“Can I stay here?” said Emma.
“What? No. Of course not.”
“Just for tonight?”
“There are two bedrooms. My son is in one. I’m in the other.”
“I could sleep on the sofa you’re sitting on.”
“Out of the question,” said Caterina. “Apart from everything else, there’s the legal aspect. I am a police inspector. You have just admitted to what could be construed as involuntary manslaughter…”
“Oh. You just said…”
“Forget what I just said. I’m sure there is a hotel you could check into. I don’t think money is much of a problem for you, is it?”
“No. That’s not my problem. It’s just I get this feeling I’m being followed. The Colonel frightens me. You can’t send me out there.”
“I am expecting Commissioner Blume to arrive soon. He can accompany you somewhere. You’ll be safe with him.”
“Will he arrest me?”
“I don’t know, Emma. He might have to.”
Caterina’s cell, set to silent, began to vibrate against the glass coffee table between them, and rotated around till it faced Emma who leaned over to look at the name on the display. “That’s your Commissioner now.”
Caterina wondered how Blume would react to her proposed change of plans for the evening, and was anxious about what he would say to her having Emma in her apartment like this. But she need not have worried. As soon as she answered, he announced, “Can’t make it. Something else has come up.”
