A Darkness Descending (26 page)

‘I guess not,’ agreed Sandro gloomily. ‘And Luisa’s keen.’

There was a silence in which they each reflected on their good fortune, and the duties it entailed.

‘So,’ said Sandro. ‘Wanda. Flavia’s friend, right?’

‘She didn’t have many friends, is what I found out. She and Niccolò were joined at the hip. The only thing she did for relaxation was go on long walks in every park and garden in the city, she smoked two cigarettes a day until she got pregnant, no drink, no drugs.’

Giuli sniffed, there was just an edge of autumn to the wind and her nose was running. Sandro remained silent.

‘According to Wanda, Flavia changed just before she got pregnant: she lost a lot of weight and was – distracted. Preoccupied. Looked beautiful, said Wanda. She put it down to hormones, maybe.’ Dutifully she repeated all she’d been told: dates next because she knew Sandro would want to know precisely, his policeman’s brain. ‘It would have been a month or so before she got pregnant: Wanda dated it from when they went on some training course in Bologna in September.’

‘Bologna.’ It struck her as entirely typical that Sandro was interested in Bologna and not hormones.

‘But no other friends? She didn’t confide in this Wanda about what had changed? If anything.’

‘The opposite,’ said Giuli. ‘Before, she’d started to loosen up – she’d had a hard time as a kid, said Wanda, and then her relationship with Niccolò’ – how had she described it? – ‘was always very high-minded, very intense, didn’t allow for girly chat, was the impression I got, or maybe she just wasn’t that type of woman. Flavia had started to open up in recent years – but only to Wanda, from what she said. Then this weight loss, this hormonal thing if you like, and she clammed up. Shut everyone out.’

Sandro grunted uneasily. ‘Hormones,’ he said. ‘I suppose there are theories about women of a certain age.’

‘Like me?’ said Giuli lightly.

‘Not like you,’ he said. And cleared his throat. ‘Though myself, I think after forty if a woman loses weight, people don’t generally think she looks great, whatever they say. They think she’s got cancer.’

Or something. Giuli realized she hadn’t told him yet, about the Addictions clinic. Who was she protecting? Flavia Matteo was dead. It felt like Giuli was somehow protecting herself: don’t judge me, don’t judge her. People make mistakes.

But the one person she could trust was at the other end of the line, listening. And addictions didn’t come out of nowhere, you had to have your need, and you had to have your dealer.

‘Cancer?’ Giuli said. ‘I don’t think it was cancer. But I think she had a – a problem.’ She cast about, trying to make sense of it, the non-drinking vegetarian. ‘An – addiction.’

‘I thought you said no drugs?’ Sandro was incredulous.

‘No, she was frightened—’

Of drugs, she was going to add, but Sandro jumped in. ‘Frightened?’ he said, too quickly. ‘That’s what the girl said too. You don’t think she was trying to come off something, coming out here? Cold turkey, kind of thing?’

‘What girl?’ said Giuli.

‘The chambermaid in Flavia’s hotel,’ said Sandro. ‘The girl – woman – who found her body.’

Giuli struggled to get her head clear. ‘Withdrawal?’ She shook her head, slowly. ‘As far as I can tell she was seeing someone here in the Addictions clinic more than a year ago. Around the time, I suppose, that she lost the weight. She stopped going after she got pregnant.’

‘That doesn’t mean she came off it,’ said Sandro. ‘Whatever it was.’

Giuli hadn’t considered that. ‘But the baby …’ She stopped, choked.

‘The baby was healthy. Is healthy. She might just have been lucky.’

Lucky. Not really: neither of them spoke.

‘I’ll try and find something out,’ she said eventually. ‘I’m a bit worried – about pushing things here, though. It’s delicate, what with them being colleagues and all.’

‘Tell me about it,’ said Sandro, with feeling. ‘Talking of colleagues—’ He paused. ‘
Ex
-colleagues, Pietro gets in touch today, after weeks, asking about Rosselli.’ He frowned. ‘Something’s not right, Chiara maybe. Or maybe it’s me: we communicate mainly via Gloria and Luisa these days.’

Giuli heard the unhappiness in his voice and didn’t know what to say. ‘Look,’ she said uncomfortably, ‘I told Enzo I’d call him back. Everything OK there? Otherwise, I mean?’ Because how could it be, really? ‘How’s Niccolò?’

There was a long sigh. ‘Rough,’ said Sandro. ‘He’s pretty rough. He’s inside eating breakfast.’ She pictured Sandro standing in the sun outside the hotel, twitchy at being cooped up with a grieving man. ‘It seems pretty clear Flavia killed herself. The maid gave me a bit of background.’ He paused. ‘Nice girl. I suppose – I suppose we’ll be back this afternoon, if he’ll agree to leave here now. He wouldn’t yesterday. I haven’t told him about the break-in yet.’ There was a pause.

‘Look,’ he said, ‘if you see that Wanda again, can you ask her if she can look over the names in the address book of Flavia’s mobile? Well, their mobile, I suppose. The joint mobile. I suppose I can text you the list of names.’ He sounded vaguely flabbergasted at the idea of the technology involved. ‘To identify them. There might be someone else you can talk to.’

‘Sure,’ said Giuli. ‘Um – give him our – our best regards, will you? Our condolences.’ Sandro grunted and hung up.

Giuli looked at the mobile a while. She genuinely could not remember a time when she hadn’t had one; there’d always been some dodgy Chinese fake or piece of stolen goods to be had for next to nothing. Cigarettes, a little fold of cash, and a mobile. The panic if you lost it, the frantic attempt to remember the lost numbers, the messages, the people who might be trying to get hold of you. She stepped out of the cloister and into the sun that shone on the scrubby grass quadrangle.

When it was allocated to the Women’s Centre, the convent had been made over to be as plain and penitential, it seemed to Giuli, as possible. No orange trees or statuary, the vaulted cloister scrubbed clean, only a fragment or two of eroded frescoes bearing sparse witness. A calming environment: perhaps the theory was that if they left any of the religion behind it might stir up negative feelings among the sinners who visited the Centre. Guilt, say.

Giuli felt the smooth, warm weight of the phone in her hand. Did she feel guilty, was that her trouble, guilty for having wasted her life and abused her body and done one or two stupid, ugly things? But wasn’t guilt just – natural? In a way it made the world function. She tried to imagine a person free from it. Those well-fed politicians acting like blue-arsed baboons with teenage immigrant girls in some brothel in Rome, did they feel guilty? Maybe it was part of the fun for them.

The sun fell on Giuli’s face. The cloister was quiet. She was waiting for the scrape of chairs, banging of doors and chatter of voices that accompanied a staff break. Waiting, specifically, for the nurse from Addictions to come out so that she could try and persuade her to breach her duty of confidentiality – and do so to someone such as Giuli, who was as far from being there in an official capacity as was possible. But it was still early and so she dialled Enzo, unsure if her heart was sinking because she’d spent too much time contemplating ethics, or because she just dreaded talking to him. Her own
fidanzato
, her betrothed.

Sandro would say that you only have to know the difference between right and wrong. Don’t talk about guilt, don’t invent sins. She could even hear his impatient voice in her head: don’t indulge yourself. The phone rang three times and then Enzo answered. At the sound of his voice the dread evaporated, the sky above her seemed suddenly a brilliant blue.

‘Hey, darling,’ she said. ‘What’s up?’

‘I don’t know, exactly,’ he said. ‘But it’s not good.’

Out of the corner of her eye Giuli saw movement in one corner of the cloister and she stepped back out of the sunlight.

‘What d’you mean?’ she said, watching. Two doctors – both women – were standing, smoking outside the door that led off the STD corridor. She shifted uneasily. ‘Oh, yes, Bastone. Sandro told me he’d landed you in it.’

‘He did?’ Enzo sounded serious. ‘Well, I guess he did the right thing. Bastone’s in a proper state, God knows what he was thinking, letting them—’ He broke off. ‘You still there?’

‘Yes,’ said Giuli, forcing herself to concentrate. ‘There was a break-in, Sandro said. In the middle of the night.’

‘Bastone called me just after you went out,’ said Enzo. ‘Seven-thirty.’

‘He can’t have slept,’ said Giuli, thinking. ‘Sandro said he called at two in the morning or something. Called them at the seaside.’

‘He’d got the place made secure, at least,’ said Enzo. ‘Not that there was a whole lot of damage, it’s hardly Fort Knox. A cracked pane of glass, which was incidental. The locks are so old it must have taken them all of a minute and a half to force the door.’ He sounded despondent. ‘I should have said something about it months ago, just didn’t get around to it.’

‘And what did they take?’

‘The laptop. Worth about a hundred euros, if that.’

He sounded worried, though, more worried than she could remember him being. Enzo didn’t panic, ever.

‘Was there a lot of stuff on it? Useful stuff?’

‘Nothing that’s not backed up. Mailing lists. Publicity material. Donors’ details. It’s not that I’m worried about, it’s not lost. It’s—’

‘What?’ Giuli said sharply. ‘What is it you’re worried about?’

‘These weren’t thieves,’ Enzo said. ‘They’re not going to sell that laptop. They want what’s on it. They want something on us, on the Frazione.’

‘But there’s nothing …’ Giuli swallowed ‘… to worry about. Isthere?’

‘I mean,’ he said patiently, ‘the names, the people; someone wants to know who’s behind us, who’s involved, who to target. That’s my worry.’

Giuli shifted the phone under her chin. ‘I thought we’d done with all that? That conspiracy theory stuff.’ She spoke uneasily. ‘I thought this was just a – personal thing.’

‘Yes,’ he said, sounding strained. ‘Well, let’s hope so. I mean – it’s bad enough, isn’t it? The personal thing.’ Were there things he wasn’t telling her? ‘I’ll – I think maybe I’ll give Sandro a call. Tell him what Bastone told me, the police and all that. What they – what they said to him. What they did.’

‘All right,’ Giuli said hesitantly, thinking of what Sandro had said about Pietro. She lifted a hand to shade her eyes: in the furthest corner of the cloister she saw the green scrubs and white cap of a nurse appear, luminous in the vaulted shade. ‘All right – look, I’ve got to go, angel.’

The woman stood her ground as Giuli approached across the grass, but she eyed her warily. In her top pocket was the outline of a soft packet of cigarettes: her own little addiction.

Giuli stopped the other side of the low wall and leaned against the fine pillar of pale grey stone. Under the cap the nurse’s brown hair was very short and threaded with white. What was her name? Their paths rarely crossed, but Giuli put calls through to Addictions often enough. ‘Sorry,’ she said.

‘What for?’ said the woman, her voice smoke-roughened. She fished for the packet without taking her eyes off Giuli.

‘It’s your break,’ said Giuli. ‘I don’t want to spoil it.’ The name came to her, along with the sound of the woman’s voice, and a distant echo of something else. ‘It’s Barbara, isn’t it?’

‘And you’re Giulietta.’

There was something about the way she said it. ‘I work the switchboard,’ she said guardedly.

‘I know that,’ said Barbara, eyeing her narrowly. ‘I put in a word for you when you applied for the job. Though I don’t suppose you’d have been told.’

Giuli stared, uncomprehending. ‘You put in a word for me?’

‘You don’t remember when the Women’s Centre was in the Borgo Santa Monaca?’ The nurse lit up and took a deep drag. ‘I’ve been in this job a long time.’

Shit, thought Giuli. ‘I don’t remember,’ she said. ‘There’s a lot I don’t remember about those days.’

‘I cleaned you up a few times,’ said the nurse, blowing smoke out of the side of her mouth. ‘We’d talk about rehab and treatments and I’d give you a diet sheet and the methadone and you’d disappear off the face of the earth for a few months.’

‘And you still put a word in for me for the job?’

Barbara’s eye was caught by something over Giuli’s shoulder: she took the cigarette from her mouth and held it cupped under one hand. Officially, smoking was not even allowed in the cloister – nowhere that was technically enclosed by the premises.

‘There was always something about you, Sarto,’ she said drily. They were probably the same age, thought Giuli, seeing the woman’s cracked lips, the fine lines around her eyes. Good-looking still – maybe more so for being close to the end of caring what men thought. Or maybe Barbara had never cared.

She inhaled the smoke rising from under her hand, and sneaked another quick drag. ‘You knew what was happening to you. You kept messing up but you kept coming back, too. You never gave up. You knew the difference – and most of them never did, even when they were way back up the line compared to you.’

‘Knew the difference?’

‘Between behaving well and behaving badly,’ said Barbara, taking a long pull on the last of her cigarette, and stubbing it out carefully in a matchbox she took from her pocket. ‘Good and bad, right and wrong, you know.’

‘I’m not so sure,’ said Giuli, resting her cheek against the smooth warmth of the grey stone pillar, suddenly tired.

‘That’s part of it,’ said Barbara. ‘Not being sure is part of it.’ She stepped closer and Giuli could smell the cigarettes on her breath.

‘So,’ she said. ‘What can I do for you this time, Giulietta Sarto?’

*

He was there, but it looked to Luisa that if she’d been a second longer than her five minutes, he’d have upped and gone.

The Caffè La Borsa was tiny and mirrored and twinkled with golden light: it made Luisa – who’d been there only once, for the shows – think of one of those bars in Paris. It was a tourist place – that was the business they were all in, on this street – but it was fine. Giancarlo was sitting at a tiny round table in the furthest corner, as if trying to hide, a lost cause in this little, light-filled box of a place.