A Taste of Death

Book 38: Murder Room

by Richard Grindal

Genres: Mystery; Traditional Mysteries

Synopsis

When journalist Ronnie Bart visits a Rome clinic, where one of his colleagues lies drugged, he becomes involved in a series of adventures in which fear and death are never far away. In a Copenhagen nightclub, Bart meets a young millionaire, Paul Arved, and goes with him and his 'flying circus' of girls and hangers-on in a private jet to the South of France. They then proceed to Sicily, where the story reaches a dramatic, violent finale.

Release date: January 14, 2016

Publisher: Orion

Print pages: 156

Sample

TRANQUIL, efficient and discreet; that was how the clinic appeared and those who could afford a clinic in Parioli would expect nothing else.
Downstairs in the entrance hall the walls and floor were of green marble and a window opposite me looked out on to lawns, a fountain and a row of protective trees. Upstairs wealthy bankers humoured
their livers, film actresses recovered from unnamed abdominal complaints and those who really suffered were fortified by the knowledge that they would die in the finest luxury Rome could offer.

After I had been waiting ten minutes a doctor came. Young, handsome, self-assured, he might have made a career in films himself, if any studio could have afforded the money he was earning from
medicine in Italy.

“I’ve come to see Andrew Wishart,” I told him.

“So the receptionist told me. Are you a relative, may I ask?”

“No, I work for the same paper. My editor in London sent me to see if there’s anything we can do for Wishart.”

“You can see Signor Wishart by all means, but your visit may not mean much to him. Will you come with me, please?”

We rode up to the second floor of the clinic in an elevator as quiet as a well-bred Persian cat. Slim nurses moved soundlessly along the corridors in their white, crepe-soled shoes. For an
instant through a partly open door came reality in the form of a hysterical laugh and then the door was quickly shut, stifling the sound, restoring normality.

Wishart had a room that was probably a few square metres smaller than those of the tycoons and opera singers on the first floor, but was still large enough to be restful in an expensive style.
It was reassuring, I decided, to know that The Clarion looked after its staff so well. A dark haired nurse was fussing round the bedclothes.

“Hullo, Andrew,” I said in a cheerful, bedside voice. “You may not remember me, but we met for a moment at the last staff conference in London.”

Wishart lay in bed staring ahead and out of the window. His face had an unusual hue, neither pale nor flushed nor mottled, but a colour which resembled plaster on a decaying wall.

“Is there anything I can do for you?”

The plaster face turned slowly towards me.

“Santa Giuliana,” he said in a whisper no louder than a rustle of dry leaves. “Santa Giuliana.”

“Is he a Catholic?” the doctor asked.

“Shouldn’t think so for a moment. Staunch Presbyterian, I imagine. Why?”

“I thought he might be calling on his favourite saint.”

I remembered Wishart from our one meeting as a Glasgow Scot, bellicose and demanding, too positive a reporter for the pretentious liberalism of The Clarion. Now his eyes were drained of
spirit or aggression and empty of recognition.

“He’s under sedation,” the doctor remarked. “Perhaps it would be better if you came back to see him in a couple of days.”

“But is there nothing I can do?”

“He needs a few personal things; pyjamas, a razor and a toothbrush.”

On the way down in the elevator the doctor explained that Wishart had been found unconscious in the Piazza di Spagna. The British Embassy had arranged for him to be sent to the clinic after
contacting The Clarion in London.

“What’s wrong with him anyway?” I asked.

“He was in a state of collapse; mental as well as physical. The root cause would appear to be drugs.”

“Are you sure?”

From what I knew and had heard of Wishart, drugs would be totally out of character. Tough, abrasive, he was not a man who would ever look for a soft way to compromise with life. He wanted to
fight it.

“There’s no doubt at all that he’s been using drugs. Too often and too much.”

The taxi which had brought me from the airport was waiting outside the clinic. Driving into the centre of the city, I noticed how little Rome had changed in the two years since I had left it.
Paris was being filled with sham British pubs and London with sham American eating houses, but trendy culture had left no mark on Rome. A brittle aristocrat was riding a fine bay in the Villa
Borghese; American matrons limped from fountain to fountain; out-of-work Italian waiters prowled the Piazza del Popolo in search of English girls.

In the modest office of The Clarion in Via Barberini, Wishart’s secretary was waiting. She was an Italian girl of about thirty named Rosangela, who proved she was emancipated by
wearing a purple trouser suit and blue tinted glasses the size of saucepan lids, which were balanced precariously on the top of her head. She knew that Wishart was in a clinic but nothing more.
When I told her of his condition, she was incredulous.

“Drugs? I can’t believe that! If he had been using them I would have known.”

“Was there no warning of this illness? No sign that it was coming?”

“I hadn’t seen him for almost ten days. He had been away from Rome.”

“Where?”

“He went to Milan to interview Paul Arved.”

Arved was the pop millionaire, one of the most publicized men in the world. Starting as a singer, his career had been a spectacular flight to wealth and success. He had written a best-selling
novel and a satirical revue that was still running in London and a dozen other capitals. A one-man exhibition of his pop art was touring the States. Then, turning to commerce, he had started a
successful music publishing business, a company with factories all over Europe making leather clothes and another producing Easy Rider motor-bicycles. Now he was chairman of the company which
marketed Mysto, the soft drink that was threatening to outsell Coca-Cola. And he was only twenty-six.

“What on earth was Andrew hoping to write about Arved that hasn’t been said already in twenty languages?” I asked Rosangela.

“I don’t know. He said he would only be away for a day, but then he telephoned to tell me he would be delayed. That’s the last I heard from him.”

“Do you know where he lives in Rome? I promised to fetch some things from his apartment and take them to him at the clinic.”

Not only did she know where Wishart had lived but she produced a spare key to the apartment which she claimed he had always kept at the office. She also insisted on driving me in her car to the
apartment which was in Corso del Rinascimento, not far from Piazza Navona. I suspected that she might have been there before.

The apartment was on the fourth floor, small but stylish and three classes above anything I had ever been able to afford in Rome. I began to wonder whether Wishart might not be earning more as
Rome correspondent of The Clarion than I was getting paid in Paris.

We found a toothbrush and a cordless Remington shaver in the bathroom, which seemed to confirm what Rosangela had said about Wishart intending to visit Milan for only the day. The pyjamas under
his pillow were exactly the same type as those my father used to wear, warm and serviceable and patterned in broad blue and white stripes. They were not the jazzy, dissolute pyjamas that one would
expect a man on drugs to wear.

While we were looking round the apartment in case there were any other personal belongings which Wishart might like to have with him in the clinic, a tiny man in a faded suit let himself into
the living-room.

“Who are you and what are you doing?” he asked us suspiciously.

“We might ask you the same question.”

“I’m the portiere here.”

Rosangela explained that she and I worked for the same paper as Wishart, that he was ill in a clinic and that we had been asked to fetch some things for him. The suspicions of the portiere
seemed, if anything, to grow sharper.

“Then what about the two men who came yesterday?”

“Which men?”

“They also said they were from the newspaper and I let them into the apartment.”

“What did they want?”

“How am I supposed to know? They said they had come here for the same reason as you two and I left them in the apartment to get on with it. I have other work to do, you know.”

“How long were they here?” I asked, not because I was interested but to establish my authority to question the man.

The portiere shrugged his shoulders. “Perhaps thirty minutes.”

A thousand lire note helped to reassure him of our credentials. We put Wishart’s belongings into an airline travelling bag which we found on top of the wardrobe and Rosangela drove me back
into the centre of Rome. Since my last meal had been a frugal petit dejeuner in Paris at six-thirty, I was hungry, so I took her to lunch at Ranieri’s. Wishart had not seemed to be in urgent
need of either his toothbrush or a razor.

Disappointingly, there was nobody in the restaurant who would have remembered me from my four years as editor of Mediterranean Round-up in Rome. Even Rosangela, whose father was a
playwright and who must therefore move at least on the fringe of the literary set, seemed not to have heard of any of my former friends. I was tempted to ask her about Sonia, the Italian girl who
had lived with me in Paris and left me without warning to return home, but fear of the truth held me back. Sonia would be married by now, to a diplomat in all probability and enjoying, as the most
beautiful, fashionable and successful hostess in Rome, a life which I could never have afforded to give her.

Instead of mentioning Sonia, I explained to Rosangela that I had been sent to Rome as a stand-in for Wishart while he was ill. The Foreign Editor of The Clarion had asked me to come and
since my Italian was fluent, I was a logical choice. Even so, all the way on the plane from Paris a nagging thought had been bothering me. My temporary replacement as Paris correspondent was to be
the nephew of the owner of The Clarion, a young man new to the paper. Could it be that I was being elbowed out of my job and Wishart’s illness had provided a convenient excuse for
putting in train a devious piece of nepotism? If I had known Rosangela better, I might have confided my fears to her. As it was, thrusting gloomy thoughts away, I told her about Paris, drawing a
witty contrast between my life there and my earlier precarious existence in Rome.

It was almost four o’clock when we arrived at the clinic. The receptionist took us to an office where the young doctor whom I had met that morning was waiting with an older man, the chief
of the medical staff. They looked grave.

“We have bad news for you, Signor Bart, I’m afraid,” the young doctor said.

“Don’t tell me Wishart is worse.”

“It’s more serious than that. He died less than an hour ago.”

Incredulity crippled my senses and I stared at the two men, convinced that this was some inexcusable hoax. Sedated or not, there had been life and even vigour of a sort in Wishart when I left
him a few hours ago. Beside me Rosangela gasped.

“But you gave me no idea that his condition was critical!”

“When you saw him it wasn’t.”

“Then I don’t understand.”

“Your friend died through taking an overdose of cocaine.”

My immediate reaction was anger. Here was yet another example of the bungling incompetence of the medical profession. For two hundred and fifty thousand lire a day one could buy a bed at the
clinic, but not, it appeared, the simplest of routine attention.

“What! Knowing he had been taking drugs, you let him get his hands on cocaine.”

The chief of the medical staff looked shocked. “But the cocaine wasn’t taken from our supplies! Of course that was the first thing which we checked.”

“Then where did he get it?”

“The drug must have been smuggled into him here.”

ON an S.A.S. flight to Copenhagen, I took the photograph from my briefcase and studied it again. It was a black and white glossy print, 18 cms by
24 cms and the name stamped on the back showed that it had been taken by an agency in West Berlin. Andrew Wishart was featured in the photo, standing with a young man whom I recognized as Paul
Arved. Around them were other people, some drinking near a bar, others frozen in frenzied poses as they danced against the startling décor of a discotheque.

The photograph had been one of the few possessions they had found with Wishart, when he had been discovered unconscious in Piazza di Spagna. It had been in his briefcase together with some
information on the career of Paul Arved and the companies he owned, Wishart’s passport and his chequebook. There was nothing more; nothing he had written, no shorthand notes, no hotel bills
or receipts for his expenses.

Flying to Copenhagen had not been my idea. When I had telephoned The Clarion in London to tell them that Wishart was dead, the foreign editor had been full of questions. Amongst other
things he wanted to know where Wishart had spent the last few days before his death.

“God only knows,” I had replied. “He seems to have disappeared for over a week. The girl in the Rome office doesn’t know where he went and there’s nothing in his
files to show.”

“We must know what he had been up to. Take whatever steps you think necessary to find out.”

The simplest course seemed to be to find Paul Arved and take it from there. As far as anyone knew, Arved was the last person to have seen Wishart alive. I had telephoned the press office of the
Mysto Organisation in Italy and learnt that he was on a tour of Europe, opening a chain of discotheques that were his latest enterprise. According to his schedule he would be in Copenhagen that
evening. If Wishart had followed him to Berlin then I might learn something by following him to Denmark.

Returning the photograph to my briefcase, I glanced through the material that Wishart had collected about the Mysto Organisation. It told me that during the previous year 47 million bottles a
day of the stuff had been drunk in 127 countries throughout the world. Sales of Mysto were growing at a rate more than double that of any other soft drink and to keep pace with demand the company
expected to build six more bottling factories in different parts of the world within the next eighteen months.

Mysto, the advertising blurb drooled, was the trendy drink, produced for the young by the young themselves. The chairman of the company was twenty-six and none of the directors over thirty.
Plans for the future were bold and imaginative and steps were being taken to diversify the group’s activities into new and exciting spheres.. . .