Ratking (33 page)

As it got worse, it got better. This is a pack of lies, she thought.

Perhaps in an attempt to counter its reputation for gross inefficiency in everything that matters, the State is a stickler for precision when it comes to trivia. The legal system which takes so long to bring people to trial that they are often released after being found guilty, having already been imprisoned for longer than the period of their sentence, insists that statements to the authorities record not only the date on which they were made but also the time. Thus it was that Ivy learned that Silvio’s statement to the police had supposedly been made at twelve forty-two that day. Which was very interesting, because she remembered quite clearly that Silvio had spent the half-hour before lunch whining about the selfish and thoughtless behaviour of his brother Daniele and in particular his habit of eating the Bulgarian yoghurt which he, Silvio, went to considerable time and trouble to obtain from a stockist in Rome. That meant that the statement was not just a pack of lies but a transparent forgery. But this didn’t reassure Ivy, quite the contrary. Because that big loopy signature at the bottom was genuine all right, so that Silvio had to be a party to whatever monstrous conspiracy was afoot.

She looked up at Zen, conscious that nothing of all this showed in her face.

‘I don’t know what to say. I feel like asking if this is some kind of joke. But it quite obviously isn’t.’

The grey eyes regarded her cryptically.

‘So what
is
it?’ she demanded with a nervous laugh.

‘It’s a statement made to me by Silvio Miletti.’

‘It’s a pack of lies!’ she cried. ‘It’s rubbish, sheer invention, as you must know very well! And not even very clever invention! Do you really think that if I’d committed a murder I would bring the gun back to the house in a plastic bag and leave it lying in my room in full view while I went to have a shower?’

‘The witness describes you as hysterical. Hysterical people do irrational things.’

‘I was
not
hysterical!’ She sounded it now, though. ‘I wasn’t even there! After I got back from Cinzia’s I went home to my flat, for heaven’s sake.’

‘What time was that?’

‘I don’t know, late morning. I remember I had to do some shopping, to get something for lunch. Yes, that’s right, and then I ran into a friend on the Corso. We had an aperitif together. There, that proves it. He’ll verify my story!’

‘What about earlier, before the appointment with Cinzia? Where were you then?’

She was about to reply, but checked herself.

‘If you’re going to question me then I’m entitled to the presence of a lawyer.’

Zen acknowledged the point with a fractional inflexion of his lips, not so much a smile as the memory of a smile.

‘But this isn’t an interrogation,’ he said.

His words were such an unexpected relief that Ivy felt quite faint. The riot in her body had been put down, but at too great a cost.

‘I really must go,’ she murmured.

Zen stared at her in silence. His expression was even more alarming than Chiodini’s, although quite different. He was looking at her as though she was dead.

‘I’m afraid that’s not possible.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Signora, an eminent citizen has come forward and made a statement implicating you in the murder of his father. Now I don’t know exactly what conception you have of the duties of the police, but I can assure you that I wouldn’t be performing mine if I simply ignored this allegation on the grounds that the person accused claims that it’s all a pack of lies.’

‘Are you saying I’m under arrest?’

‘Not exactly. You’re being held on suspicion of having committed a crime punishable by life imprisonment. This will be communicated to the Public Prosecutor’s office, who will in turn inform the investigating magistrate. She will want to question you, I imagine. But that won’t be for a day or two. She’s in Florence at the moment. The kidnappers are under arrest there.’

So far Ivy had been proud of her control, but now a little manic giggle escaped her. Dear Christ, how much more could she take?

‘Obviously she’s got her hands full with that at the moment,’ Zen continued. ‘The Public Prosecutor is supposed to be informed within forty-eight hours, and the magistrate is bound to interrogate you within a further forty-eight. In practice that tends to get run together to suit everyone’s convenience, but at the worst it shouldn’t be later than Tuesday.’

‘Tuesday.’

The word seemed meaningless.

‘And until then?’ she asked.

‘Until then you’ll be held here. Chiodini!’

The bruiser came back in.

‘Take Signora Cook down to the cells.’

The word was like an electric shock, and Ivy sprang to her feet.

‘Just a moment! I’m entitled to make a phone call first. It’s my legal right!’

Zen ignored her.

‘Now listen to me, Chiodini,’ he said. ‘I won’t be here to supervise this, so I’m depending on you. Until Rosella Foria gets back from Florence Signora Cook is out of bounds, in quarantine. Understand? She speaks to no one and no one speaks to her. And I mean no one!’

‘Right, chief. Come on, you!’

Chiodini made a grab at Ivy’s arm, but she evaded him and stalked out, deliberately repressing all thought. There’ll be time for that when I’m alone, she told herself.

As it was, she had to fight even for the small privilege of solitude. The cells were in the basement of the Questura, which clearly predated the rest of the building by several centuries. The doors had an air of total impenetrability which Ivy found oddly reassuring. Her privacy was very important to her, and she saw the doors not as shutting her in but as keeping others out. What had always terrified her most about prisons was the overcrowding, four or five people shut up together in a cell intended to be barely tolerable for two. Italians seemed to be able to stand such enforced intimacy, but Ivy knew that it would drive her mad. She simply couldn’t function adequately without a space she could call her own, and she was acutely aware that in the hours ahead she was going to need to function not just adequately but quite extraordinarily well.

So it was a nasty shock when the cell door swung open to reveal a strange-looking woman with a smell on her and a wild look in her black eyes.

‘I’m not going in there,’ Ivy said firmly.

‘Oh, you’re not, eh?’ Chiodini replied.

He stared at her in some confusion, unsure how to proceed. If it had been a man he would have hit him. But with women things were different; you could only hit them if they were married to you.

‘There are lots of other cells,’ she pointed out.

‘They’re being painted.’

‘For God’s sake, man, she’s a
gypsy
! How would you like it?’

Chiodini could see her point. His mother had told him about gypsies. With a bad grace he locked the cell up again and installed Ivy in the one next door.

She slumped down on the bed. To think that on her way to the Questura, just an hour ago, she’d been worrying about whether or not to splash out on that slinky but hideously expensive Lurex trouser-suit she’d had her eye on for some time. The contrast between that reality and this cell, this mean pallet bed, that door as massive as the slab over a tomb, was so disturbing that she felt black waves of panic lapping up at her. But she refused to give in. To do so would be sheer self-indulgence. She had managed before, after all. When she discovered the reason why she had been invited for that weekend in Bologna she had calmly set about reviewing the options open to her. They fell into two categories, revenge and reward. There was no question that revenge was a very attractive option, but in the end Ivy had rejected it in favour of reward. Damaging your enemies is satisfying, but doing yourself a favour is more important in the long run. Only in exceptional circumstances is it possible to combine the two.

Like everyone else, Ivy had envied those who had a secure job, guaranteed by the State, which could not be taken away no matter how lazy or incompetent you were and whose admittedly meagre salary could be supplemented by tax-free moonlighting in the afternoon. Her position at the hospital was, as they said, ‘precarious’. To keep it she had to please, which meant everything from picking up one man’s suit from the cleaners and buying fresh pasta for another to queuing for over an hour in the pouring rain to get theatre tickets for one of the patients, quite apart from being expected to do the work of an entire typing pool single-handed. But she didn’t dare complain. ‘Don’t give yourself airs!’ the old fascist who served as porter remarked when she’d made the mistake of letting herself be provoked by his rudeness. ‘The day the director decides he doesn’t like the colour of your knickers you’ll be out on the street.’ He had no need to add, ‘On the other hand I’m here for ever, whether he likes it or not.’ That was implicit in everything he did, or more usually failed to do.

Ivy didn’t necessarily want to work at the hospital for ever, but she did want to be the one who would decide if she would or not, and that meant getting a secure position. The director had the granting of such posts, but he knew what they were worth and wasn’t going to hand them out to some foreigner when the telephone was ringing off the hook with locals offering him this that and the other if he would see to it that Tizio or Cosetta was fixed up. So Ivy bided her time and kept her eyes and ears open, waiting for events to take her where she wanted to go.

Then one day her employer came storming into the poky annexe where she worked and grilled her for over half an hour about some documents which he said had disappeared. From a man who habitually paraded his velvet gloves this display of iron fist was disconcerting, the more so in that Ivy knew nothing of the existence of the documents, never mind their disappearance. But now she did, and she knew that he half-suspected her of having taken them. All of which added up to the opportunity she had been waiting for, because despite this, the porter’s prophecy was not fulfilled. Her job hung on a whim, but it was not indulged. The conclusion was obvious, and brought with it the reflection that her employer was not as clever as she had previously thought.

That afternoon she returned to the hospital after lunch, supposedly to catch up on her work. The other porter who, just to balance things out, was a Stalinist, responded to her request for the key to the supply cupboard as she had known he would, by tossing her a huge bunch opening every door on the top floor of the building. Identifying and labelling the keys was a task which the porters considered too onerous to undertake, and since their jobs were not precarious no one could make them do so. So if anyone wanted the spare key to a particular room they were given the bunch for the entire floor in question and had to find the key themselves.

It took Ivy twelve minutes to do so, but that was the hardest part of the whole business. Men did not hide things very well, she knew. Their minds ran in predictable ways. Once inside the director’s office she quickly found the spare key to the filing cabinet, taped to the back of it, and a few seconds later the missing documents were in her hand. They had been where she had known they must be, lying on the floor of the metal drawer. They had been carelessly replaced between two files and had then worked their way down as the drawer was opened and closed. It was obvious, it happened all the time, and yet her employer had not thought of it. Part of the reason was that predictability of the male mind she had already noted, but it was also due to a structural defect of the system under which they all lived. The great weakness of paranoia is that it cannot take account of chance. Because the documents were sensitive and might be damaging to him if they fell into the wrong hands, the director had assumed that their disappearance must have been due to a deliberate act on someone’s part. To think otherwise would have been to run the risk of being exposed as gullible and unrealistic, the very things that a man in his position could least afford to be.

Back home in her little flat Ivy examined the documents at her leisure. They looked innocuous enough, mere lists of figures and dates and initials, but the next morning before work she dropped into her bank, opened a safety deposit box and placed the documents in it. She did well, for when she got home she found that her flat had been ransacked.

That evening she phoned her employer, rambling on incoherently about how she couldn’t go on living in an atmosphere of insecurity and lack of trust, of groundless accusations and the perpetual fear of losing her job. If she had a secure position perhaps she would feel differently, but as it was, well, she didn’t know what she might do. Really, she felt capable of almost anything.