A Darkness Descending (31 page)

‘But it’s possible,’ Rosselli said eagerly. ‘Someone could have climbed up here.’ Out of the corner of his eye Sandro could see no drainpipes or handholds: he could also see an elderly man watching them from the condominium’s rear terrace.

‘I don’t think so.’ Vesna’s voice was quiet, but certain.

‘Why not?’ Rosselli stood straight, hands clenched. She stepped around him respectfully.

‘Look,’ she said, and pointed, her finger a centimetre or so above the balustrade but not touching it. ‘The exterior hasn’t been decorated in twenty years. If anyone had come over here, the paint would have flaked off all over the place.’

The stone floor of the balcony was dusty, but no more than that. Vesna went on, quietly determined. ‘And whoever climbed up would have been covered with dust. You only have to blow on it –’ and she leaned and blew by way of demonstration, and the powdery blue distemper lifted obediently from the plaster ‘– and you’re covered.’

She stepped back. ‘Plus the old folks next door are so terrified of being robbed by
Albanesi
, they call the police when a stray cat comes into their yard.’

‘Albanesi,’
said Rosselli, but all the energy was gone as he looked dully down into the garden next door. ‘Yes, they always blame the
Albanesi.’

The Frazione, Sandro knew, took a very liberal stand on the immigration issue for which the word
‘Albanesi’
had become shorthand: they were anti-racist and all the rest, but this seemed to him no more than a reflex. Would it save Rosselli, all this politics? Or anyone else, for that matter? Sandro wasn’t going to count on it.

‘I’m sorry,’ said Vesna, glancing back inside.

Rosselli said nothing. He turned abruptly and went back in, and before they could slow him – warn him, protect him – he walked straight into the bathroom. And stopped.

The huge marble bath stood like a tomb in the centre of the room, gleaming palely in the half-light. A crouched shape was on the tiled floor beside it: staring, Sandro realized that it was a towel.

‘You found her,’ said Rosselli, without turning.

‘Yes,’ said Vesna, and Sandro could tell it was only with an effort that she was holding her ground. And then, haltingly, as if unsure of whether she should say it or not, but in the end having to: ‘She was wearing her underwear.’

And it seemed to be the odd banality of the words that did for Niccolò Rosselli because he suddenly folded in on himself like a long articulated doll and was on his knees, leaning against the bath, and making a sound that Sandro only belatedly realized was sobbing.

He knelt beside the man: it was almost a relief to feel Rosselli’s back shaking under his hand. The bones: the man was thin, thin as one of those starved saints.

He was saying something over and over, trying and failing to get to the end of it. ‘She would never – she would never – she would never—’

‘Never what?’ said Sandro gently. He glanced sideways and saw Vesna’s eyes on him from the doorway, as if she wanted to say something to him but could not take one step further into the room.

‘Come on,’ he said into Rosselli’s shoulder, inhaling his acrid scent of sweat, despair and lack of food and sleep. ‘Let’s go downstairs.’

Abruptly, the room seemed horrible to Sandro; even though he had no belief in any single supernatural thing, it seemed to him a haunted place. Rosselli’s head turned, his gaunt face streaked with the drying tears, but something in him had been mastered. Had Sandro still been a policeman, he might have taken advantage of this opportunity to examine the dead woman’s husband for signs of guilt, for some inappropriate response. But the professional reflex seemed to have deserted him and instead he waited.

‘She would never let a stranger see her – unclothed,’ Rosselli said. ‘She put the underwear on for you.’ Looking across at Vesna. ‘Not to shock you.’

‘Not to shock me,’ repeated Vesna. Sandro felt something knot in his chest at the thought of Flavia Matteo’s modesty, and the futility of it: at the note of dull acceptance in Rosselli’s voice. He swallowed.

‘Downstairs,’ he said, and inserting his hands under Rosselli’s armpits, raised him bodily from the floor. Ahead of them Vesna moved across the room as lightly as a ghost and opened the door.

They parked Rosselli in a grimy lounger on the verandah. He’d been obedient enough coming downstairs and Sandro had been relieved not to have to carry him; at Sandro’s age, it would have been an undignified struggle to do more than prop him up.

He’d seen the watchful look in Vesna’s eye from the lobby below as, with painful slowness, they’d negotiated the wide, ill-lit staircase with its monumental mahogany banister, and had interpreted it as her doubting his ability to make it to the bottom. But when they emerged on to the sunlit verandah, he saw she was trying silently to convey some different message.

‘A glass of water?’ she said, leaning down into Rosselli’s face as if talking to someone very ill. ‘Or perhaps – ah – coffee?’ Sandro frowned. No coffee, she’d said, she wasn’t allowed. She straightened. ‘Perhaps you could help?’ she said to him, with a meaningful tilt to her head.

‘Water,’ said Rosselli vaguely, looking but not seeing her gesture, and she turned to go inside. ‘Perhaps a glass of water. Then we should go – home.’ He looked at Sandro. ‘Didn’t you say that?’ He spoke with a kind of blank relief, as if it had all been wiped clean. Sandro’s head ached with the effort of trying to understand him, and with dread of the journey home.

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I’ll just help the girl.’ And hurried after her.

He didn’t know where she’d gone: he went into the bright dining room, where the chairs were still stacked on the tables, save the two at which they’d sat when he’d been there before. He heard a chink from behind a door at the far end of the room and there she was, in a small old-fashioned kitchen with the kind of cupboards his mother’s kitchen had had sixty years before. They hadn’t been modern then.

‘I’m glad he didn’t want coffee,’ she said. She looked exhausted in the sunlight. She set two glasses and an elderly bottle of mineral water on a tray. ‘We refill them from the tap,’ she said, seeing him looking. ‘The bottles.’ She didn’t pick the tray up.

‘What did you want to tell me?’ Sandro asked, and then, ‘Do you really think no one could have climbed up on that balcony?’ But even as he said it the idea seemed outlandish: cat burglars, or some killer tracking Flavia down and cutting her wrists in the bath. Why? If they wanted rid of the Frazione, it would have been easier to kill Niccolò Rosselli. The certainty settled in him: she’d wanted to die, and even her husband had accepted it now. Did they really need to know why?

Yes.

‘I went to the Pizzeria Venere,’ said Vesna, and for a moment he didn’t understand what she was talking about. ‘Where Calzaghe sent her.’ She raised her head, as if even the mention of her boss’s name was enough to bring him to the door.

‘Yes,’ said Sandro, intent now. ‘Yes.’

‘A wine shop and a kitchen shop,’ she said. ‘The man in the wine shop knew who I was talking about, right away. The dead woman with red hair. Everyone in this town knows. Only he said he hadn’t seen her, not on Monday morning nor any other time. He was the kind to have run straight to the police, too, if he had. Highlight of his week, it would have been.’

‘Uh-huh.’ Sandro knew the type. ‘So she went to the kitchen shop?’ He scratched his head, mystified, and caught a gleam in Vesna’s eye.

‘Not so much kitchen as electricals,’ she said carefully.

‘Ah.’ A picture formed itself in Sandro’s mind of the standard provincial kitchen-cum-electrical shop – alarm clocks, irons, answerphones – and he remembered pulling over yesterday morning, on his way back from observing the insurance claimant. Was it only yesterday? Pulling over and parking up on the edge of the Isolotto, where an electrical shop sat alongside a dry cleaner’s, all quite normal, all quite innocuous, the domestic services provided to ordinary, decent law-abiding citizens everywhere. A possibility suggested itself. But he waited for Vesna to tell it her way.

‘There was an old woman in there at first, she said she didn’t know anything. A bit fuddled – I don’t think she was quite all there. But I kept saying, “A red-headed woman, who was in the newspapers,” and then a customer came in, a tourist, and the woman knew what he’d come for because she just said, “He’ll be back in a minute, you have to deal with him. With my grandson, it has to be done on the computer,” she said. Because she didn’t know anything about computers.’ Sandro nodded, concentrating on keeping up as the chambermaid talked without pause, knowing with ever greater certainty where she was headed.

‘So I hung around,’ Vesna went on, as diligent as a rookie police officer. ‘Waiting behind the microwaves. I wanted a look at the grandson. And when he came, and I saw what the tourist wanted him for, I knew.’

‘Yes,’ Sandro said. The same thing as Flavia had gone for, but where was it now?

‘She’d have had to go back to the hotel and get her ID card, you see, there’s a lot of paperwork involved nowadays. You need a document, you need your tax code, it’s all done on the computer. When I got mine – well, that was before all the terrorist stuff came in.’ And she raised her head and looked him in the eye, knowing he knew.

‘A SIM card,’ he said.

‘A prepaid mobile, and a SIM,’ Vesna said, raising her hand to her mouth to suppress the nervous, inappropriate smile coming to her lips. ‘These days you can buy them in all sorts of places, and the electrical shop sells them. I asked the grandson, and he remembered, straight away. He must have been the only person in the town who didn’t know the red-headed woman had committed suicide.’ Her expression was grave. ‘He seemed a nice boy. He was so shocked.’

There was a sound from beyond the dining-room door so faint he hardly registered it. But Vesna did, and she paled in recognition.

‘Calzaghe,’ she said, lifting the tray in panic.

‘So she went looking for a phone,’ Sandro said, lifting a hand to detain her, just one more moment. ‘Because she’d left hers at home? But there was no phone, was there? In the room, after she died?’

‘No,’ said Vesna, eyes fixed on the room behind him, then with an effort shifted to meet his eyes. ‘Because she didn’t buy it. They told her about the registration with the authorities, the need for identification, and she said she didn’t have it on her.’ Vesna swallowed. ‘She didn’t come back. He said … the boy … that happens sometimes.’

People panic, they don’t want to go through all the paperwork.

‘There was something else,’ she said. ‘I didn’t think of it before, I hardly noticed it. There was something. On her hand—’

Why had she left the mobile behind? Had she just forgotten it? If she needed to make a call, why hadn’t she used the hotel switchboard?

‘She had a phone, at home. She could have brought it with her.’ Sandro was more or less talking to himself now, but looking up he registered that Vesna’s anxiety was still focused on the doorway behind him. He turned and stepped ahead of her through it, and there in the dining room stood a fat man of about his own age with small, suspicious eyes and an unmistakable air of hostility.

*

‘Caro.’
Luisa spoke to the answerphone uncertainly. Should she send a text message instead? They always seemed so insufficient, terse: she was too old, that was the truth of it. She needed the spoken word. ‘I saw Pietro, I saw him – well, it’s hard to explain. He said it was a covert operation but – oh, damn. I suppose you’re driving. I need to talk to you. Are you driving? I hope you’re on the way home.’

She was rambling now. Cut it short.

‘Maria Rosselli came by the shop this afternoon, with the baby. She asked when you’d be back and I said before it was dark. Anyway, I’m home now. I left early.’

She clicked the phone off. The apartment was cool and silent around her: she needed to get something on for dinner.

No need to go into it all, the whys and the wherefores, not on an answerphone. Sandro was unreliable enough at checking his messages, anyway.

Pietro had walked her back, dutifully, like a stranger in his jeans as they came through the sunny, crowded Piazza della Repubblica. ‘I’m trying,’ he’d said, after long minutes’ silence. ‘I’m trying not to be too heavy-handed. But it’s a dangerous world out there.’

Did all fathers think the world was too dangerous for their daughters? Perhaps all policemen did. ‘Chiara was tied up with this Frazione, too,’ he’d said. ‘You knew that, didn’t you? I don’t know if this guy’s connected with them, even.’

‘I think he might be older than her,’ Luisa had said, slowly: Giancarlo hadn’t said it in so many words, but it felt like the truth to her.

They’d reached the Orsanmichele, both of them turning down the side of it, beckoned by the quiet and stillness in the tall shadow of its soft sandstone façade. With its white marble cornicing, its recesses lined in blue with silver stars, a market converted to a church, it was probably Luisa’s favourite building in the city, too delicately pretty almost to be Florentine. It didn’t seem to belong to the history of bloodshed and power struggles and men. They’d stopped walking.

‘Older?’ Pietro’s voice had been dangerously quiet.

‘Just an impression I have,’ she’d said, realizing that she’d probably said too much already.

‘I don’t like it,’ he’d answered, his voice ragged. ‘I don’t like the boyfriend – the older boyfriend, if that’s what he is – and I don’t like the politics. The Frazione – plenty of people want rid of it. I don’t want her associated – say a demonstration turns nasty? There can be violence. I don’t want her in trouble.’ His voice had risen.

‘But it’s democracy,’ Luisa had said, surprising herself. She’d never thought she had a political bone in her body. ‘It’s the young. You can’t stop them rebelling. It’s all peaceful demonstration anyway, isn’t it?’ She realized she’d had exactly the same conversation with Sandro, only Pietro seemed to have more information. And more than he was telling her, too.

‘Do they know who’s running their Frazione? Do they?’

‘Do you?’

He’d subsided. ‘I can’t talk about it,’ he’d said. ‘I – it’s work.’