A Darkness Descending (19 page)

No chance of that this evening. It was eight o’clock and the Por Santa Maria was busy. As she kneeled down to turn the last key, Luisa could hear laughter behind her in the street; there was a good mix of people, locals happy to be back in the city after the tourist-haunted desert of the summer.

Then the phone rang, her heart jumped in her chest and the laughter behind her sounded suddenly wrong. Luisa scrabbled in her bag and Beppe kneeled beside her with a questioning look: she gestured to him to finish off and stood up, stepping away with the phone held to her ear. She could see the girl who was laughing in a small group – young, underdressed, breasts gleaming under the streetlighting – slyly registering the look she was getting from a boy in the little gang as she laughed. The young used to make Luisa smile, but some days now, the sight of a kid like that only made her feel anxious.

‘Caro,’
she said, knowing it would be him. She tried not to sound worried, and failed. ‘How’s the traffic?’

Sandro sighed, long and heavy, and something about the quality of the background sound told her that he wasn’t in the car. ‘I’m not coming back,’ he said.

‘What?’ For a single, lunatic second Luisa heard her husband tell her he was leaving her: she saw herself alone in the hospital waiting room, not out of choice but because she had no one.

‘I mean, we’re not,’ Sandro added, correcting himself but oblivious to any possible misintepretation of what he’d just said. ‘He can’t face it, not tonight. We’ve got a hotel. He says he’ll pay.’

Luisa’s world now righted itself. ‘Don’t let him pay,’ she said quickly. ‘So it was her. Was it – how awful was it?’

‘Pretty bad,’ said Sandro, and she heard the strain in his voice. ‘Rough. It was her, all right.’ He stopped, she heard him swallow. ‘She cut her wrists and lay in the bath. She’d been there probably two days.’

Luisa’s mouth dried. She blinked. She turned slightly and saw Beppe looking at her, his neat-bearded, handsome face furrowed just a little with concern. She shook her head in a gesture of smiling impatience she knew he’d recognize. Bumped a kiss from her fingers to wave him off and held out her hand for the keys.
Sandro
, she mouthed. After a second’s hesitation he dropped the keys in her open palm, straightened his waxed jacket fastidiously and, with a wave, headed off towards Gilli where he would, she knew, enjoy a Campari topped up with prosecco, and a handful – no more – of salted nuts. Beppe looked after his figure. She thought with longing of that other world, where people had routines and lived by rules, and were content with small things.

Two days. ‘Oh, God,’ she said. ‘Poor man. Poor man.’ She thought of that beautiful woman softening to nothing but water-swollen flesh in a bathtub; she thought of the rosy swaddled child.

‘Yes,’ said Sandro. Luisa thought of the night he was going to have.

‘You got two rooms?’ she asked, and there was another sigh. ‘There was only a twin left,’ he said. ‘I didn’t know the seaside was so lively in September.’

‘When the weather’s still this good,’ Luisa replied, but her mind was elsewhere. Sandro had booked himself into the same room because he didn’t want to leave the grieving husband alone, she could read him like a book. Even though he wouldn’t get a wink of sleep himself. ‘Don’t let him pay,’ she repeated.

‘He wants to – to engage me now,’ said Sandro, his voice leaden.

‘Engage you? As a detective? What for?’

‘I don’t even know,’ said Sandro. ‘Look, he doesn’t know what he’s doing. It’s a kind of denial or a distraction, or something. I expect in the morning he’ll have changed his mind. People do. I was there from the beginning, he’s leaning on me. It’s difficult.’ Another sigh. ‘But of course I won’t let him pay for the room.’

Under the uplit vaulting of the Straw Market, where the stalls were packing up and being rolled away, something caught Luisa’s eye: a profile. The smooth crow’s wing sweep of shiny black hair. Then a little bobbing group of Japanese tourists all talking in their own language, all nodding and turning their heads with that distracting foreignness of theirs, came into her line of vision, and whatever it was – whoever it was – was obscured. Absently Luisa stepped to one side to avoid a market trolley and get a better look, but someone barged into her and awkwardly she had to disengage herself.

‘You all right?’ said Sandro, hearing her intake of breath, her fumbled apology.

‘Yes, yes – I just thought – I thought I saw—’ She stopped. Best not.

‘So,’ he went on, filling the silence. ‘I’ll keep an eye on him tonight. I think – well, it depends. I’ll be back some time tomorrow, for sure.’

He didn’t sound sure. ‘I suppose he’s spoken to his mother?’ Luisa was thinking out loud. ‘She’ll have the baby for the night.’

‘I – I don’t know.’ She could almost hear him cogitating: a puzzle. Sandro liked a puzzle to solve. When he spoke again, his voice was just a little brighter. ‘He doesn’t have a mobile phone of his own, can you believe that?’ She couldn’t. ‘But he did wander off a while back, after we’d checked in, went downstairs. He might have called her from the lobby.’

‘I’ll give her a ring,’ said Luisa decisively. ‘Offer – oh, I don’t know. Help, or something.’

‘Right,’ said Sandro, and she could tell he was still in puzzle-solving mode. ‘I wonder if the old woman’s got anything to do with it.’

‘What?’ said Luisa, startled.

‘Well, would you fancy being her daughter-in-law? But no, you’re right. She’s an old bitch but she’s not bad enough for – for that.’

Luisa didn’t know what he was suggesting. That the woman deliberately drove her daughter-in-law to suicide? ‘I don’t suppose she helped matters,’ she said. Sighed. ‘Have you talked to Giuli and Enzo? They knew Flavia, didn’t they?’

‘Giuli,’ he murmured, and she could sense him receding. ‘She – I think Enzo knew them better. But Giuli was asking around. The midwife.’

He petered out:
Christ
, thought Luisa.
It’s thirty years ago, I can stand the word midwife.
She said nothing.

When Sandro spoke again his voice was different. ‘Right, look, yes. I’ll call Giuli.’ And for a second she thought he was going to hang up on her without saying goodbye. But he caught himself in time. ‘Don’t worry about me, sweetheart. I’ll call later, before you go to sleep.’

After he’d gone Luisa stood there a moment, feeling oddly dazed, people moving past her in a blur. She hadn’t even asked him if the police had spoken to them. Rosselli wanted to take him on as a detective and she had the strongest feeling, quite suddenly, that no good would come of it.

But then, when the one you love chooses to disappear without explanation – and with that thought Luisa raised her head, a small herd of tourists moved en masse out of her way, and she saw Chiara.

Luisa opened her mouth to call but she made no sound. Because what would she say? Chiara was on the far side of the small square marketplace with its high vaulted stone roof. Talking to someone Luisa couldn’t see because a stall was in the way. Chiara looked – different.

Partly it was the clothes. Every time Luisa had seen Chiara since she hit thirteen, she’d been in jeans. Skintight or loose and low-slung, darkwash, stonewash, there’d been a black phase … but it had still been jeans; Gloria had smiled indulgently and Luisa had despaired. They sold jeans in the shop and Luisa knew you couldn’t fight it, but as it moved down the generations she wondered what feminity would come to if women grew old wearing jeans. And not to mention it encouraged fat on the hips, it lost them their waist, they just let it all hang out – but no one listened. Beppe could never hide a smile when she started her rant about jeans.

Framed in the arch, one hand on her hip and a proper handbag slung over her arm, Chiara was wearing a dress. Not just a dress but a pale silk dress, the colour something between cream and peach, with short fluted sleeves, a tie at the neck, a nice fit over the waist that only came, Luisa’s practised eye recognized, at a price. And heels: four-centimetre heels in pale flesh colour: even at this distance Luisa could tell they were good shoes. Where did she buy all that? was Luisa’s first thought. And, why didn’t she come to me? was her second. But wherever she’d got the stuff, Luisa had to admit, she’d made good choices. Or someone had.

The girl’s hips swayed just a little as she talked, the handbag swung. She was different, and it wasn’t just the clothes. The pose, the unselfconscious sensuality, even the way her hair had been done, they belonged to an older woman than the Chiara Luisa knew. A man eating a filled roll at the tripe stall behind her was eyeing the girl’s legs appreciatively. Then whoever it was Chiara was talking to shifted position and she saw him, or at least the quarter-profile and a back view of a stocky youngish man. They made an odd pair because although he was decently enough dressed and probably a couple of years her senior, the boy seemed too young next to her, too gauche, his hands stuffed in his pockets.

The street was emptier, quieter now, and Luisa took a step forward, but just as she did so Chiara’s gaze shifted a fraction away from the man, and Luisa’s movement drew it across the thoroughfare, and their eyes met. Chiara froze.

Raising a hand to greet her, or delay her, or to calm the sudden panic in the girl’s eyes, Luisa took a step towards the market. Chiara, all her new poise departed, took a step back, half stumbling in the heels. Luisa saw the man put out a hand quickly to catch her arm before she went over altogether, saw him begin to turn to see what had alarmed Chiara, and then a trolley laden with cheap leather goods rounded the corner at reckless speed and came to a stop in front of Luisa, almost on her toes.

‘Hey, watch it,’ bellowed the beefy stallholder, hauling on the iron handle, his swarthy face in Luisa’s. ‘Some of us have work to do.’

Where were they?

Leaning on the soft pale stone of a pillar for a moment, Luisa wondered if she’d crossed over to the wrong bay: in front of her now the market was almost cleared away, but there was no sign of them. Not of Chiara, nor of the man she’d been talking to. She was in the right place, all right; there was the tripe stall. The man who’d been looking at Chiara’s legs was pushing the paper wrapping of his sandwich into the refuse bin and reaching for a paper towel.

‘Excuse me,’ said Luisa, breathless from hurrying towards him. ‘Did you see where she went?’

Had she ever been bothered by losing male interest? The look the man gave her was a world away from the look he’d been giving Chiara. Why would Luisa care? One breast down, but still alive. ‘The – the girl in the dress? Did you see which way she went?’

He studied her, wiping his hands, wondering if he could be bothered, whether he cared if this woman had seen him eyeing up a girl young enough to be his daughter. But then he jerked his head towards the narrow alley that led south, down to the Via delle Terme. Raising her head, Luisa thought she heard the click of heels on the stone: they could hardly have got far.

‘Thank you,’ she said, but he was already turning away.

Almost immediately Luisa knew it was a lost cause: that gloomy alley – and perhaps, she thought in a paranoid moment, the man at the tripe stall had chosen it for that very reason – had four possible exits. They might have slipped left and back to the Por Santa Maria while she was distracted, right and right again to the marble arcades in front of the post office, along the Via delle Terme to the Via Tornabuoni, or through a crooked alley crossing down to the dark, high-sided canyon of the Borgo Santissimi Apostoli.

Luisa plumped for the last option – it was the most sneaky somehow – but once she was on the Apostoli, it became obvious she’d got it wrong. The street was empty bar a dumpy tourist couple holding hands and looking in a jeweller’s window. In vain Luisa listened for that particular sound of high heels on rough Florentine flagstones but instead the air seemed to be full of all kinds of other noises: scooter engines, raised voices, the wooden wheels of the traders’ trolleys.

The tourist couple were looking at her with interest. Luisa knew what she must look like, for this frowsty pair to wonder about her: jacket unbuttoned, wild-eyed, pale and panicky. But she didn’t much care.

‘Chiara!’ she shouted, ignoring them, instead turning in a circle on the spot and looking – down the Santissimi Apostoli, back up the alley, towards the Por Santa Maria. ‘Chiara, it’s all right.’ She waited as the muffled, uneven echo from the rough stone of the tall façades died away, mocking her. ‘I just wanted to say hello.’

There was no answer.

Chapter Thirteen

R
ELUCTANTLY
, S
ANDRO HUNG UP:
at least, he thought as he put the phone away in his jacket pocket, Luisa understood. He wasn’t ambulance chasing, and he wasn’t angling for a day by the seaside. He didn’t want this job, but it seemed to want him.

The hotel was more expensive than he’d hoped, and without wishing for one they’d been granted a sea view – to bump the price up even further, was Sandro’s suspicion. Clean and cool, speckled terrazzo flooring and twin beds with pale blue covers, a single long window at which now, in a breeze that had come with the failing light, long, fine cotton curtains drifted and blew as if they were somehow being breathed in and out.

Even this modest level of luxury seemed incongruous. What had the woman at the front desk, with her blandly neutral expression and her neat suit, thought of the pair of dusty stragglers, of the dingy little Fiat they eventually left in the private underground car park? Niccolò Rosselli sat on one of the beds with his back to Sandro, barely seeming to make a dent, his shoulders dropped, still as a statue.

Rough didn’t even begin to cover it. When they had emerged from the police morgue into the fading silvery light of the seaside town on a balmy evening, Niccolò Rosselli had looked about a hundred years old.

Were there human beings who would be able to identify the dead body of their lifelong beloved companion with equanimity? Oh, yes: in his thirty years in the police force Sandro had accompanied perhaps fifty men and women to the morgue, and among those there had been a good few unable to muster up more than a dry, insincere sob; then there had been the others whose operatic breakdowns were simply a matter of going through the motions, doing what was expected. Of those, half a dozen perhaps turned out to have caused their partner’s death themselves; some had been in shock; most had simply lost any proper feeling.