Page 271 of Troubled Blood

There was a second, answering moan.

“No? All right then…”

Footsteps grew louder: the nurse was about to pass the alcove, so Robin stepped boldly out from it, smiling.

“Just washing my hands,” she told the approaching nurse, who was blonde and flat-footed and merely nodded as she passed, apparently preoccupied with other matters.

Once the nurse had disappeared, Robin proceeded down the corridor, until she reached the door of number 15, which bore the name “Mr. Nico Ricci.”

Unconsciously holding her breath, Robin knocked gently, and pushed. There was no lock on the inside of the door; it swung open at once.

The room inside, while small, faced south, getting plenty of sun. A great effort had been made to make the room homely: watercolor pictures hung on the walls, including one of the Bay of Naples. The mantelpiece was covered in family photographs, and a number of children’s paintings had been taped up on the wardrobe door, including one captioned “Grandpa and Me and a Kite.”

The elderly occupant was bent almost double in an armchair beside the window. In the minute that had elapsed since the nurse left him, he’d fallen fast asleep. Robin let the door close quietly behind her, crept across to Ricci and sat down on the end of his single bed, facing the one-time pimp, pornographer and orchestrator of gang-rape and murder.

There was no doubt that the staff looked after their charges well. Ricci’s dark gray hair and his fingernails were as clean as his bright white shirt collar. In spite of the warmth of the room, they’d dressed him in a pale blue sweater. On one of the veiny hands lying limp on the chair beside him glistened the gold lion’s head ring. The fingers were curled up in a way that made Robin wonder whether he could still use them. Perhaps he’d had a stroke, which would account for his inability to talk.

“Mr. Ricci?” said Robin quietly.

He made a little snorting snuffle, and slowly raised his head, his mouth hanging open. His enormous, drooping eyes, though not as filmy as Betty Fuller’s, nevertheless looked dull, and like his ears and nose seemed to have grown while the rest of him shrank, leaving loose folds of dark skin.

“I’ve come to ask you some questions,” said Robin quietly. “About a woman called Margot Bamborough.”

He gaped at her, open-mouthed. Could he hear her? Could he understand? There was no hearing aid in either of his overlarge ears. The loudest noise in the room was the thumping of Robin’s heart.

“Do you remember Margot Bamborough?” she asked.

To her surprise, Ricci made his low moan. Did that mean yes or no?

“You do?” said Robin.

He moaned again.

“She disappeared. D’you know—?”

Footsteps were coming along the corridor outside. Robin got up hastily and smoothed away the impression she’d left on the bedspread.

Please God, don’t let them be coming in here.

But God, it seemed, wasn’t listening to Robin Ellacott. The footsteps grew louder, and then the door opened to reveal a very tall man whose face was pitted with acne scars and whose knobbly bald head looked, as Barclay had said, as though something heavy had been dropped on it: Luca Ricci.

“Who’re you?” he said. His voice, which was far softer and higher than she’d imagined, made the hairs on the back of her neck prickle. For a second or two, Robin’s terror threatened to derail her carefully worked out contingency plan. The very worst she’d expected to have to deal with was a nurse. None of the Riccis should have been here; it wasn’t Sunday. And of all the Riccis she would have wanted to meet, Luca was the last.

“You his relative?” Robin asked in her North London accent. “Oh, fank Gawd! He was making a weird moaning noise. I’ve just been visiting my gran, I fort he was ill or somefing.”

Still standing in the doorway, Luca looked Robin up and down.

“He doesthn’t mean anything by it,” said Luca, who had a lisp. “He moanth a bit, but it don’t mean nothing, do it, eh, Dad?” he said loudly to the old man, who merely blinked at his eldest son.

Luca laughed.

“What’th your name?” he asked Robin.

“Vanessa,” she said promptly. “Vanessa Jones.”

She took half a step forwards, hoping he’d move aside, but he remained planted exactly where he was, though smiling a little more widely. She knew he’d understood that she wanted to leave, but couldn’t tell whether his evident determination to keep her inside was done for the simple pleasure of keeping her momentarily trapped, or because he hadn’t believed her reason for being in his father’s room. Robin could feel sweat under her armpits and over her scalp, and hoped to God that her hair chalk wouldn’t come off.

“Never theen you around here before,” said Luca.