A Darkness Descending (41 page)

‘What does she mean?’ Niccolò Rosselli asked, suddenly quieter and looking into his childhood friend’s eyes.

‘I loved her,’ blurted Carlo. ‘I did. There’s no crime in that.’

‘I know you loved her,’ said Rosselli, almost impatient. ‘Do you think I’m a fool?’

‘I could never have taken her from you,’ said the lawyer, miserably. The child arched his back on the sofa and Sandro smelled a sweetness off him released by the movement, of talcum powder, of clean sweat. He put out a hand and felt the warmth of the small body under the rough towelling fabric. ‘Shh,’ he murmured.

Maria Rosselli made a sound of contempt and Carlo Bastone turned to her, briefly dignified. ‘I couldn’t. I loved her, but she didn’t love me. She didn’t even need to say it. And you had your child together, it was proof she loved you only. How could I have harmed you?’ Looking at Rosselli. ‘What harm was in it?’ The man was almost crying.

‘Did you send her messages?’ Sandro asked from beside the child. Bastone looked bewildered, blank. ‘Messages?’ he said. ‘What do you mean? I saw her every day. Letters, you mean? I didn’t write to her.’

‘I saw you,’ said Maria Rosselli. ‘I saw you looking at something two, maybe three weeks ago, some photographs. I saw you put them in a drawer quickly when I came in. At the offices of the Frazione, you put them in a drawer, in a folder.’ Bastone’s face was suddenly grey. She leaned into his face. ‘I opened the folder, when you’d gone. I know what you were looking at.’

Niccolò Rosselli said nothing: Bastone turned to him beseechingly.

‘I – they – I never—’

‘Dirty pictures,’ said Maria Rosselli with relish. ‘You were looking at dirty pictures of her. Whose bed was she on?’

The child beside him let out a cry, startlingly loud, like a cry of pain. ‘Shh,’ said Sandro helplessly. What was he supposed to do now? He had no idea. He slid a hand around the child’s small warm torso, put another at the back of his neck, he’d seen that done. He picked the baby up and placed him against his chest. Was his shirt clean enough? He stood, joggled: the child snuffled and was quiet. He was warm, heavy as a sandbag, and still.

‘Photographs of Flavia,’ said Niccolò, and his voice was hollow.

‘Someone sent them,’ said Bastone. ‘They were sent to the Frazione, to me. I opened the envelope. Then they emailed them, too. I burned them. I burned the copies.’

‘Not straight away,’ said Maria Rosselli. A furious flush spread up Bastone’s neck.

‘I didn’t know what to do with them,’ he said, in agony. ‘She she looked – she didn’t look as though she was enjoying it. She looked—’ He covered his face with his hands and what he said was muffled. ‘I thought they might be evidence of some – some wrongdoing. Then I couldn’t bear it – if they were still there, you might see them,
she
might see them. I thought I should talk to you – talk to her—’

‘Did you talk to her?’ The hollowness was gone, there was something else now in Rosselli’s voice: an awful, stifled kind of pain. Grief. Bastone shook his head, his face still covered. ‘I burned them. Only that was when an email arrived with them attached. I hid it on the computer. I left it there in a folder labelled Expenses, just for a week. I didn’t know what the right thing to do was, and then I deleted them from there too. But they seemed less dangerous on the computer.’ The hands left his face.

‘Only of course it’s more dangerous,’ said Rosselli. ‘Things can be recovered from them. Or they can be planted. Perhaps those photographs are what the police are looking at now. Pictures of my wife.’

‘You never married her,’ spat Maria Rosselli.

Niccolò Rosselli turned his head very slowly and looked at his mother as if he could have struck her down, there and then, in a single blow. ‘She was my wife,’ he said. ‘I loved her, and she was my wife and my soul.’

Maria Rosselli, at last, was silent: her jaw set heavy, she looked as though she’d been turned to stone.

‘They’re gone, then,’ said Sandro. ‘The photographs? The evidence.’

And slowly Bastone nodded. ‘They’re gone.’

‘Someone else knew,’ said Sandro. ‘The same person who sent the photos. Who broke into the offices. Who tipped off the police.’

Who pursued Flavia Matteo, who forced love or some version of it into her straitened life. Who opened her and broke her.
Groomed
was a small word for what had been done here.

Suddenly feeling useless, Sandro shook his head and held out the sleeping baby to Niccolò Rosselli. Maria Rosselli didn’t move. Once he was in his father’s arms the child’s eyes opened. They were dark, almost black, and they fixed unwaveringly on the face above them.

Uneasy, Sandro looked away: looked down at his phone, which was switched off. He turned it on.

Two missed calls. One from Luisa. And Pietro Cavallaro, another missed call. An instinct throbbed, not for nothing had this man been his working partner for decades; was it Chiara? Not only. It was Chiara, and it was Rosselli, and it was the Frazione: they were connected, he knew it, and Pietro knew it too.

His oldest friend: it looked like Pietro did need him, after all.

*

‘My God,’ said Gloria, to herself as much as to Luisa. The Piazza del Carmine was packed to its edges: people stood wedged between the parked cars, against the barred windows of the yellow stucco palaces and on the steps of the great church of Santa Maria del Carmine. Overhead the sky was a hard, brilliant September blue.

After their encounter with Giancarlo, Gloria had been all for driving over to the Isolotto and up and down those quiet streets of apartments until they saw Chiara, coming out of a shop perhaps or on a balcony, hanging out washing. Instead, Luisa had called the office when Sandro’s mobile went to answerphone, and had got Giuli.

‘I’ll keep trying him,’ Giuli had said. ‘He’s in with Rosselli. There’s something here he’s got to see, though.’ There’d been such a dull emptiness to her voice that Luisa had had to ask. ‘You’ve found out what happened? To Flavia?’ It wasn’t that she’d forgotten Flavia, it was only that the woman was dead, and Chiara was the one who needed their help now.

‘I know why she killed herself.’

Gloria had been too distracted to listen to what Luisa was saying, which was just as well. They’d abandoned the Cavallaros’ little red car in the Borgo San Frediano, up on a pavement, unable to move any further.

‘Who are they?’ Gloria asked now, bewildered. ‘Who are all these people?’

Dreadlocked youngsters in patchwork coats occupied the terrace of the Dolce Vita: the proprietor had ceased his attempts to shoo them off and stood beside them, watching proceedings. Fierce old women shouted, bearded boys, respectable types. A brigade of schoolchildren, barely more than sixteen, in formation like Roman soldiers and pushing cheerfully to and fro in the middle of the throng.

‘This is the Frazione,’ said Luisa. ‘This is Giuli’s lot. Chiara’s lot. The young people’s party.’ Gloria scanned the faces more urgently, but even supposing Chiara had been among them, it would have been like finding a needle in a haystack.

NIC. CO. LO!

On the steps of the church someone had a loudhailer, and a banner that Luisa was not close enough to read. He was calling through his megaphone and the crowd answered him.

Behind him and inside the great church the frescoes stood quiet in their chapel, telling that old story, thought Luisa as she surveyed the scene, of sin and temptation. Adam and Eve, the fallen woman covering her face with her hands as she runs from the Garden of Eden, her mouth gaping in a howl of horror and shame.

Flavia Matteo.

Giuli’s voice had been ragged as she told Luisa on the phone, as though she were the woman betrayed and abandoned. ‘A man came after her. She fell in love with him, with the way he spoke to her, through his messages. He – he seduced her, and she was helpless. She’d never been in love before, not like that.’

Even a modern woman, it seemed, even a woman who didn’t believe in the snake and the apple, could fall: could run out of the garden and die of shame.

Luisa didn’t find it surprising, not for a minute. Didn’t it lie in wait for all of them, the most virtuous woman and the most sophisticated alike?

She spied an opening, round to the side, that would lead them to the Via del Leone. Did Giuli know all this was going on, five hundred metres from the office?

NIC. CO. LO!

The crowd swayed and roared. Luisa quailed at the thought of what would happen when he came.

*

They sat, side by side, the notebook open on the desk in front of them. Enzo’s laptop sat beside it, humming into life.

‘Don’t look,’ said Giuli. ‘Don’t read it. No one should read it.’

She felt as though in that small book was everything any woman had ever had to be ashamed of. The longings and the weakness and the need – all of it.

‘I don’t want to,’ said Enzo, and he took Giuli’s hand. He’d turned his head slightly away from her as he did so, and Giuli understood, with a small pulse of pity and love mixed, that he couldn’t look at her in case she should see he was talking about something precious to him; that he was also too fearful it wasn’t precious to her to be able to look her in the eye.

She just shook her head, mute.

‘How did it start?’ On Enzo’s face she saw pity fighting with disgust.

‘Don’t judge her,’ she said quietly, and he darted her a quick look. ‘She was walking in the Botanic Gardens. She tripped or something, and he helped her. He asked for her mobile number because he was worried about her, he said. And that night he sent her a message, to ask if she was all right.’ Giuli found she couldn’t actually bear to talk about it. She wished Luisa would come.

His last message to Flavia, two weeks after the child was born. The phone sitting on the shelf beside the baby monitor.

Dai, finiamo. Non mi diverto più.

Come on, let’s finish it. I’m not having fun any more.

He’d kept it going more than a year. That showed stamina. Had it been strategic? Had he been waiting for something to happen before he pulled the plug on her? He had: there’d been a number of things he’d been waiting for.

She’d got pregnant with her husband’s child, that must have slowed things down for him. Flavia had hoped it would cure her, but it hadn’t.

And she’d hung on a month after that last message. She must have looked at that little screen a thousand times a day, waiting. She would have done anything to have that feeling back but it had left her, as a chemical left the body, leaving only its toxic residue. Giuli blinked something back.

‘What’s going on out there?’ she asked. ‘Was that what you were going to tell me? About the demo?’

‘They want Niccolò,’ Enzo said. ‘I was all morning on the computer –’ he flushed ‘– I was supposed to be servicing the computers at a textile warehouse but I got a tweet. Someone said there was going to be a flash rally, down here, in support of the Frazione. It went viral: the kids are really on to it, you know? The technology.’ There was the briefest inflection of pride, before he sobered. ‘I had to bring up the Frazione’s website on my laptop to monitor activity.’ His flush deepened. ‘The site was crashing every few seconds under the weight of it, so people were tweeting instead.’

He gazed through the window, marvelling. ‘So many people. Some journalist had been stirring it online, gloating over the police raid, and people just flipped.’ He shook his head. ‘They’re sick of being manipulated. By the authorities: the army, the carabinieri, the police, the press – everyone. We’re being watched everywhere. Let them watch us now.’ He was almost on his feet.

‘This was what you were going to tell me?’ Giuli asked.

Enzo sat back down, his face suddenly pale. Slowly he shook his head again.

‘Flavia was groomed?’ he said. ‘That’s what you think? She was targeted.’

‘I think,’ Giuli concentrated on keeping her voice steady, on not letting the rage she felt contaminate her argument, ‘that he watched her in the gardens. She walked every day in the Strozzi, or the Boboli, or the Orto Botanico.’ She frowned. The Orto Botanico was near the university, wasn’t it? Where Chiara studied … ‘He might have seen her in any one of those places: everyone knew who she was, he might have tracked her in all of them. I think he waited for his opportunity. He might have waited a long time before he got his opening.’ She looked at Enzo. ‘She must have been a sitting duck. All that emotion, kept in check all those years. Just a question of pressing the right buttons. A technique some men have.’

‘She slept with him.’ Enzo’s voice was flat with disillusion.

Slowly, Giuli shook her head. ‘We don’t know for sure.’ She couldn’t repeat those parts to him, the hotel room by the sea. And later, when he’d taken her to an empty apartment.

‘He was playing a long game,’ she explained. ‘He took her to the seaside to make her fall in love with him, once and for all. To show her he wasn’t only about sex.’ She blinked. What had Sandro said? The man who saw her come out of that hotel said Flavia had looked like she’d died and gone to heaven.

‘And he wasn’t. He was all about power.’

Enzo opened his mouth, hesitated. On the desk the telephone rang. Giuli stared at it, startled that it should still exist, nearly obsolete technology, untouched by the break-in. She picked up the receiver.

The voice was peremptory, the bad temper of a provincial official begrudgingly giving in to pressure. ‘I’ve received permission from the next-of-kin, and the police have authorized it, God knows why.’

It was the coroner in Viareggio, wanting to double-check the agency’s email address before he sent the image of Flavia’s wrist.

‘Oh, yes,’ she said, thinking furiously as she looked at the empty desk, Damn, damn. ‘Look. Our computers are – are down. You’re going to have to send it to a different address. I’m Sandro’s assistant.’

‘This is irregular,’ he said, and she heard the twitchiness in his voice. ‘I don’t want these autopsy pictures getting into the wrong hands. For obvious reasons.’ He wouldn’t want much of an excuse to change his mind, permission or no permission.

‘It’s a number,’ she said. ‘Isn’t it? I was standing next to Sandro when you talked to him. Look, call him if you want.’ Silence. ‘It’s so important,’ she said, because it suddenly seemed that it was, that she couldn’t wait one moment longer to nail this thing. And it might have been that the official heard the anguish in her voice but he let out an impatient sigh and said brusquely, ‘All right. All right then. Give me the address.’