A Darkness Descending (36 page)

‘Yes,’ said Sandro. ‘And with family matters, I suppose?’

‘Family matters?’ Bastone was wary, at last.

‘Well, I understand your family owns a great deal of land. Your expertise must be useful.’

‘I don’t understand what you mean,’ said the lawyer stubbornly. ‘I don’t understand what this has to do with – with Flavia.’

Something about the way he spoke her name. ‘It’s not just Flavia, though, is it? It’s more complicated than that now.’

Bastone seemed frozen behind the heaped desk. Did he read these dusty books? The photograph of the lawyer’s mother stood behind him on the shelf: it seemed to Sandro to display the kind of sweet smile that disguised selfishness, caprice, greed, jealousy. He noticed that there was another photograph further along, of three figures standing in an awkward group at some social function. Niccolò Rosselli, Flavia and Bastone, the pale woman at the centre all the more radiant somehow, even from where Sandro stood, for her dowdy, ill-fitting dress.

‘Are you an only child, Dottore Bastone?’

Bastone just stared as though he had renounced all hope of understanding Sandro’s approach. ‘I am,’ he said, barely audible.

Sandro inclined his head. ‘So your mother depends on you?’

‘It’s in the nature of the relationship.’ A fight back. ‘I don’t understand what you’re asking me.’

‘Does she mind your involvement with the Frazione?’

Uneasily, Bastone twisted his head on its broad neck. ‘She’s not interested in politics. She doesn’t understand – my relationship with Niccolò.’

So the mother was hostile: obviously, she would be.

‘Not interested in politics,’ Sandro said. Interested in money, though, I bet, for all Maria Rosselli said they weren’t the vulgar sort. ‘Did she just think it would be a passing phase? And now – it’s time to return to your responsibilities?’ Sandro paused. ‘I mean, as a landowner. I imagine she has exerted pressure?’

Bastone paled, and Sandro knew he was right. ‘It is true, isn’t it?’ he said gently. ‘That your family will become considerably richer if that road is built, the road the Frazione Verde opposes?’

Now Bastone was on his feet. Unperturbed Sandro continued.

‘I have information –’ and he took a breath, thinking of Pietro, of those dreary offices in the Via dell’Agnolo where taxes were estimated and historic ownership of patches of wasteground proven, ‘that the land registry shows the purchase of your
terreno
– your building land – is under way. The permissions have been granted for the commercial centre. I imagine the price goes up as each obstacle is overcome. The Frazione – against all the odds – the Frazione seems to be the only thing left in your way.’

There was a long silence: Bastone stood, pale but steadier somehow than Sandro had seen him before. At last the lawyer spoke.

‘In
my
way?’ He tilted his head, like a large, predatory bird, and for the first time Sandro could after all picture him in a courtroom. ‘My way is the Frazione’s way, you forget that. Flavia and Niccolò and the Frazione –
they
are my family.’ But there was a stiffness in the way he said it. ‘My mother—’ And he clicked his teeth, a sound of uneasy frustration. ‘My mother doesn’t understand.’

You bet she doesn’t, thought Sandro. His gut feeling about this man was shifting despite himself, but he resisted. There was something buried deeper than he had yet dug.

‘They might have been your family,’ he said, ‘a kind of family. But blood is thicker than water. It is hard to resist a mother, if you’re an only child. And all this—’ He looked around: the lovely long windows with their aspect on to the flank of the church, the polished wood, the great dark wall sconces. ‘Did she threaten to take all this away?’

From the look on Bastone’s face, he knew he was right.

‘Wouldn’t it have been enough to say, “Withdraw your support, leave them”? Were you funding them?’

Bastone stood very still. ‘Niccolò wouldn’t take money from me, even if I had it to give,’ he said. A question hung unanswered: Why not? Sandro pressed his advantage. It seemed to be time for the direct approach.

‘Did she demand that you bring the Frazione down? You had access to those computers. You seem to have allowed the vice squad in without a fight. Did you know what they were looking for? Did you know all along?’

The light shed through the windows was grey today, and standing in it Bastone was greyer still. ‘They said it was illegal material,’ he said, and his voice shook. ‘They said the thieves – the burglary – it was connected. They said they believed that whoever stole the computers made the tip-off. They had the correct warrants, all the documentation was in order, I was obliged—’ But Sandro interrupted him.

‘You were first on the scene of the break-in,’ he said. ‘It seems an extraordinary coincidence to me. First Flavia,’ and he saw Bastone flinch, ‘then the break-in, then the vice squad. The illegal material. What material is this? You know, don’t you?’

‘Indecent images,’ said Bastone, once more barely audible. ‘That’s what they said.’

Sandro thought of what Luisa had told him about Maria Rosselli’s haughty dismissal of Carlo Bastone. Not very intelligent: a boy who’d wanted Niccolò Rosselli’s life. And when he couldn’t have it? When Niccolò Rosselli refused to take his money?

‘You know,’ he said. ‘You know. What images?’

‘I did nothing to harm the Frazione,’ said Bastone, and Sandro saw tears, real tears, in the creases of his pouchy eyes. Saw the pudgy schoolboy whom no one would befriend. ‘I would never – never! I told Mamma. I told her that I wouldn’t leave the Frazione, she could do what she liked.’ He waved a hand helplessly, turned his face away from the grey light. ‘She only cared about money. Money is nothing.’

Easy for you to say, thought Sandro, but Bastone’s voice held the ring of truth. Carlo Bastone didn’t know what it would be like without money, so he probably meant what he’d just said. There was something he wasn’t saying, though: Sandro burrowed back through the exchange, listening in his head for the words that Bastone had faltered over.

Flavia.
He looked into Bastone’s eyes and didn’t even need to say it.

‘I loved her,’ said Carlo Bastone. ‘I’ve always loved her.’

And in the thin light of the great room he closed his mouth. He put one hand to it and then another, like a child trying to stop himself saying another word.

Chapter Twenty-Three

I
T WAS THE RIGHT
time to be going.

There’d been thick low cloud over the sea at dawn and the town was dull and sunless close to midday as Vesna turned towards the station. The season was over and done.

Calzaghe had said that as she wasn’t giving notice, she’d have to go without the previous week’s wages. Never mind that he’d have let her go at the end of the week without any warning, anyway.

He’d tried to inject triumph at his own cunning into the dismissal, but it had fallen flat. She had caught him looking up at the Stella Maris in sullen confusion, the striped police tape still flickering from the railings, as if only now realizing that the hotel was never going to make him his fortune. Vesna felt only relief as she walked away, her suitcase surprisingly light in her hand. She’d never been one to accumulate things: there’d be time for that. There’d be time and family and home, for that.

Outside the dry cleaner’s – his blind down, only open three days a week, now that September was almost over – litter was blowing in the street. As Vesna frowned at it, following a crumpled length of cellophane unfurling in the breeze, there he was. Coming around the corner after it in his luminous jacket, stabbing with a kind of pincer arm to catch the ribbon. He looked up, at her face then down at the suitcase in her hand. Vesna couldn’t help but feel rewarded by his transparent dismay.

‘You’re leaving,’ he said. Rubbed his forehead, leaving a smear. He took off a glove and looked at his hand: scrubbed, nails dean, observed Vesna.

‘Yes,’ she said. And smiled, the smile broadening at the thought of her escape. ‘I jumped before I was pushed.’

‘When’s your train?’ he asked abruptly.

‘Not sure,’ said Vesna. ‘I was just going to turn up and wait.’ She felt completely at ease. However long she had to sit on station platforms today, it would be worth it, to leave this place behind.

‘Had enough of us?’ he said, half-reading her mind.

‘Not all of you,’ she said, beginning a smile, then she felt her face fall.

‘Would you have a coffee with me before you go?’

She hesitated.

‘There’s something I wanted to tell you.’

They stood in the Bar Cristina on the front: he’d suggested they go to the station and wait there but Vesna wanted to be alone for that, that last moment of departure. What was half an hour, anyway? The journey across the breadth of the country – Florence, Bologna, Verona, Trieste – mapped itself in her head, the slow
regionale
trains, the lit-up windows, the deserted stations at midnight. She wouldn’t be home till midday tomorrow.

They knew each other’s names, after a year’s nodding acquaintance, but they didn’t use them: it seemed too late to become familiar. He bought her a
cafè latte
with grave politeness: he was probably only her age, Vesna realized. When he took off his cap she saw a band of startlingly pale skin at the hairline. And this morning he didn’t have that whiff about him, of dregs and stale grease. Perhaps there just wasn’t so much rubbish now the tourists had mostly departed.

She should go.

‘Have they decided, then?’ he asked quickly, as if to detain her. ‘About the woman? Flavia Matteo: it’s all in the papers. It was suicide?’

Tweaking her hair in front of a mirror behind the coffee machine, Cristina looked along the bar at them for a second. The dustbin man bobbed his head down and drank his espresso quickly, staying out of Cristina’s range. Vesna wondered what it was he wanted to tell her.

‘I mean, otherwise they probably would be asking you to stay around.’ He gave her a lopsided smile.

‘I don’t know anything about it,’ she said quickly, wishing she didn’t, wishing she’d never come to the Stella Maris. These men with their kind, serious, searching looks: Sandro Cellini and now this one – as if she didn’t feel sorry enough.

‘I just meant—’ His face fell. ‘Doesn’t matter.’

Cristina was closer to them now, refilling the already full sugar dispenser, spilling some on the bar.

‘It
was
suicide,’ said Vesna. ‘There’s no doubt.’ And she shut up, sipping the coffee. She didn’t mention that Flavia Matteo had been dressed in her underwear. That tugged at her too painfully. The modest woman, whose limbs had probably never even been exposed on a beach.

She should have made the detective listen more closely, about what she’d seen written on Flavia Matteo’s hand, but what good was it now? She didn’t belong here. Sandro Cellini’s departure had left her feeling more alone than she had since she left home.

‘She wanted to buy a mobile phone,’ Vesna said, surprising herself: a good fifteen years since her last confession but the urge somehow seemed to be intact. ‘There was a number …’

The dustbin man nodded, thinking of something else while Vesna waited for him to absolve her, but before he could say anything Cristina pounced.

‘She’d been here before,’ she said. ‘She was here last year, this time last year. Season ending. I saw her.’ And she stood a little straighter, proud of her announcement. ‘She didn’t stay with you then, did she?’

Dumbly, Vesna shook her head.

‘She was at the Miramar,’ said the dustbin man quietly, wiping his lips with a scrap of paper napkin, leaning down to dispose of it carefully in the tall copper waste bin under the bar. They both stared at him. ‘She was there for one night, the first Saturday in September, the same night as the Festival of the Sea.’

‘Did you tell him?’ said Cristina. Vesna frowned. ‘The detective guy,’ said the cafe owner impatiently. ‘Or did you tell the police?’

‘I’ve been working it out,’ said the man calmly. ‘I wasn’t sure. I have a memory system, you see. Plenty of time in my job, to work through things. Take it slowly is always best, work backwards from the details.’ Neither woman spoke: they both still gazed at him.

‘Well, for a start the Festival of the Sea generates a lot of refuse,’ he said, serious-faced. ‘I start very early. I saw her coming out of the Miramar that morning.’ His frown deepened. ‘Early. I didn’t realize it was the same woman for a while – she looked – she looked different. That morning. I looked at the picture over and over, the picture in the paper.’

Cristina reached under the bar and without a word set
Il Tirreno
down between them. There she was. Flavia Matteo – pale, beautiful, dosed. Unhappy. ‘Something about the mouth, the hair … it had to be her. And I asked to look in their log, you know, the visitors’ book.’

Vesna looked at him, tried to imagine the desk staff at the smooth, modern hotel watching him walk in off the street with his request.

The Miramar,’ said Cristina, contemptuous. ‘That’s the problem with those chain hotels. All trained up somewhere in America not to notice people. Like it doesn’t make the world go round, noticing people.’

‘I explained,’ said the man mildly. ‘I kept saying, “It’s the woman in the paper.” In the end they gave in. The police hadn’t been there, the receptionist didn’t know what I was on about. She was foreign.’ He darted an apologetic look at Vesna.

‘I don’t think the police really bothered much,’ Vesna said. She felt the sadness lying in wait. ‘They knew it was suicide.’

‘You
noticed,’ said Cristina. ‘I bet.’

Vesna felt weary. ‘You should call him,’ she said. She wanted to pick up her suitcase and go to the station, because she had nowhere even to sit down in this town any more. But she couldn’t. ‘The detective guy. Sandro. Tell him: tell him when you saw her before. Tell him where.’ Her shoulders dropped. ‘Have you got his number?’

The dustbin man shook his head: they were both looking at her with kindness and Vesna thought she might scream if they didn’t stop. She pulled her bag across her front on to the bartop and began to dig through it. ‘It’s all right. I’ve got it here somewhere.’