The Drowning River (24 page)

‘What?’

He concentrated. ‘In the night, when I thought I’d solved it. I must have been delirious. It was all to do with the autistic boy and the art school, I dreamed him at the art school, working as an assistant. But. . .’ and he held up a finger ‘. . . it wasn’t all nonsense. I remembered where I’d heard of the school before, the famous Massi family. What was it you said? About the wife?’

Uncomprehending, Luisa stared at him.

‘That she had a thing about shoes?’ she said. ‘Always trying on crazy high heels?’

Sandro frowned. ‘And went away without buying?’

‘Actually no,’ said Luisa. ‘You wouldn’t know it to look at her but I think that woman must have a wardrobe just for her shoes. Though where she gets the money. . .’

‘Yes,’ said Sandro slowly. ‘That’s it; you said, the school must be doing well. There was some kind of investigation, only I don’t remember the details. A few years back, the Guardia di Finanza looked into the business. Thought they were doing a bit too well, considering it was just a little art school.’

‘And?’

‘I can’t remember,’ said Sandro frustrated. ‘It wasn’t a police case. The Guardia don’t involve us unless they have to, obviously.’ He frowned. ‘I guess they didn’t have enough evidence; the school still seems to be going.’

He thought there was just a trace of scepticism in the look Luisa gave him. ‘Could be nothing,’ he said apologetically. ‘I mean, it could be just the standard operation for fleecing foreigners, couldn’t it? Plenty of money in art schools.’

‘Could be,’ said Luisa, and he sighed at her cautious tone. At the sound, she said, ‘But it’s something, isn’t it? A bad smell, always worth going after the source of the bad smell.’ A third note went down on the paper, Massi. ‘Plus, of course, you really should have talked to him already, about the girl.
In loco parentis,
isn’t he?’

There was a silence. Luisa stood and began to clean out the coffee pot and refill it. They’d had that little pot since they were married, though it had been through a couple of dozen rubber seals; he watched her run the tine of a fork around the seal, fill the base up to the valve and build a little mound of coffee, the Vesuvio as they called it in Naples, her hand cupped around it to stop the coffee spilling. Women should be put in charge of most things, he reflected. She spoke to him over her shoulder.

‘So why don’t you go and talk to someone there? Better than sitting on our hands, isn’t it? Call Pietro. Call the guy himself, dammit, call Massi.’

‘But it’s Sunday,’ he said, losing hope almost immediately. ‘I’ll call the school tomorrow. I guess he’ll talk to me.’

Luisa gave him a look.

‘You bet he’ll talk to you,’ she said. ‘He’s responsible for that girl, and if you can’t get hold of the room-mate. . . I’m sure I can get hold of his home number – Badigliani’ll have it, but why not try the school, anyhow? You’ve got nothing to lose. And if I was married to that woman, I’d go to the office on a Sunday, too.’

‘I’ll call Pietro, first,’ he said, giving in. He went into the sitting room they never used and dialled his old friend from the stiff, slippery silk of the sofa they never sat on. What Pietro said was interesting. But Sandro wasn’t going to rush this one.

‘I think I will call the school after all,’ he said to Luisa, who beamed her encouragement from the sink. At least all this is keeping her happy, he thought.

But as Sandro took out his phone again, it was already ringing. On the other end Iris March was breathless.

‘You tried to call me?’

But before he could say anything she went on. ‘You have to come over,’ she said.

Iris Hadn’t Even Been looking, when she found it. Or at least, she’d only been looking for a raincoat, and despite all her best intentions she had been thinking about Jackson, wandering with cold feet through the apartment in the flat, grey morning light. Catching sight of herself in the huge spotted mirror in the
salotto
and inspecting herself, to see if she looked any different.

She’d woken at eleven to see that it was raining again, relentless, falling straight down and blurring the view, the green dome and the distant hills of Fiesole. It was as if Florence was getting a whole winter’s rain in one week. She stared out at it, and shivered.
What did you think you were doing?
she heard Ma scold.
You’re all I’ve got. I don’t want you pregnant before you’ve even started. You hardly know him.

Iris thought of how Jackson had been, all yesterday; his fist banging down on the table, the sudden coldness, the evasion. The busy parents in Vermont with their luxury car franchise might as well have been aliens for all they had in common with Ma, pottering about the galleries in Aix, trying to make ends meet. And there was the police record he wouldn’t tell her about, and the afternoon after he’d said goodbye to Ronnie – or so he said – when he hadn’t come to school. He had avoided telling her about that, too.

I like him, Ma. She tried the phrase out in her head. It sounded lame; the kind of thing any number of girls said.

You hardly know him.

I can’t stay your baby for ever, Ma. Iris put her head in her hands.

Her phone bleeped, somewhere in the flat. It took her a full five minutes to find it, and she was ridiculously breathless when she saw the words,
New message; read now?
She opened it.

You have one missed call,
and then the number. Damn it, thought Iris, that bloody signal that comes and goes, wiped out by a draught or a passing bus. Then she looked at the number and recognized it as the detective Sandro Cellini’s and felt slightly less alone; she wasn’t sure if that was a good thing or not. She needed to stand on her own two feet. She decided she would get dressed and call him.

There was another message, though; Hiroko.
Maybe today?
it read, plaintively.

All right, thought Iris guiltily, maybe today, hell. She needed to get out, and suddenly the thought of the dim, scented apartment and Hiroko’s anxious face was an oppressive one. She flipped the phone shut.

She looked back at herself in the big rusted mirror. There were shadows under her eyes, that was all. No older, no thinner.

Slowly Iris got dressed, staring through the window at the rain; her clothes weren’t up to it, her coat still damp from yesterday. The rain seemed to have a special quality of wetness, hyper-drenching. She thought there might be some kind of mac in the big hall cupboard. This was heavy, ancient, made of carved black wood. There was a door at either end and a central panel; one door opened on a cleaning apron and a stack of candles, the other on a row of clattering hangers and a smell of mothballs.

Then she saw that the central panel contained a small knob of blackened brass, almost indistinguishable from the carved rose around it. It was stiff, but when she yanked hard it opened, and suddenly there it was. Innocent as anything, a plain black nylon holdall; a weekend bag, packed and ready to go.

It was heavy; Ronnie never had been good at travelling light. Iris tugged at the straining zip and there, sitting on top of a brand-new
and expensive watercolour set, was a long rectangle of printed card; Iris pulled it out carefully and looked at it. It was an effort to process the information it contained, at first: a first-class return air ticket to Taormina, Sicily, leaving at 15.40 on the evening of Tuesday November 1.

Fifteen-forty? She’d have had to head straight there, practically. Even Ronnie’d have needed to check in by two.

A return. Ronnie had been due to fly back to Florence on Friday afternoon; she should have landed at three, in the rain; she would have been back in the flat at around the time the police came looking for her at the school, with her bag. Only she never caught the flight in the first place. Alive or dead – and at the thought Iris’s stomach lurched, as if she was really understanding it for the first time – Ronnie was still in Florence. And as it lurched there came a guilty stab of relief, because Jackson had been telling her the truth; there had been a bag.

Then, as she stared down at the ticket, what Iris thought was, this is what he was looking for. Whoever had come to the flat had been looking for this bag. He’d been through the flat and found nothing; he’d tried to wipe the computer, and he’d gone. He had her keys, that was how he’d got in; he knew where she lived.

Could it have been a double bluff? Could Jackson have come to the apartment looking for the bag, and, having failed to find it, covered his tracks? Suddenly it was as if that draught was blowing through the gloomy flat all over again; it was as if there was whispering in its dark corners.

She fought panic, rooted to the spot in the dark chill of the hall, and then it came to her that she wasn’t alone. There was someone. ‘Don’t worry,’ he’d said last night, like the father she’d never had. ‘We’ll find her.’ She took out her phone and called Sandro Cellini.

Luisa stood in the warm ticking quiet of her own home and wondered what she would do when all this was over. Tomorrow still seemed a long time away: the appointment at the breast clinic at Careggi; the bus
she would take to get there; the argument she would have with Sandro about whether he should drive her.

The parking was madness at Careggi. Stupid to take the car, this wasn’t an emergency.

Sifting through the papers on the table, the photograph, the newspaper cutting, Luisa put them away in the brown file and slotted it into the big tote she took to work. Giulietta would be here in a minute, and there were things to do. She could sort this Scuola Massi business out, for a start. She reached for the phone book.

It turned out that Luisa had been right, of course; Paolo Massi did spend plenty of time in the office, whether it was to get away from his wife or not. Plenty of men did, she supposed. Dottore Massi wasn’t on the premises when she called – Luisa explained the situation instead to a stern-voiced woman who told her warily that she was his deputy, Antonella something – but he would be in the studio later.

‘May I make an appointment for Mr Cellini to speak with him?’ said Luisa, inhabiting the part of tough secretary with enjoyment. ‘Yes, of course, it is Sunday, I understand that, but clearly this is a matter of some importance.’ She waited while the woman blustered to indicate offence, mild outrage, suspicion, and finally capitulated.

‘Twelve o’clock?’ she suggested, looking at the clock. Sandro had left at eleven; twelve would give him a chance of some lunch, afterwards, maybe with her and Giulietta. ‘That will be fine.’ She hung up, and texted Sandro with the details.

The doorbell shrilled furiously; Giulietta. Only Giulietta Sarto leaned on the bell like she wanted to wake the dead.

‘The bird has flown,’ Luisa said as she opened the door. ‘Sorry about that, Giuli, but you know what he’s like when he’s on a case.’ It was a nice thought, Sandro back on a case.

She smiled broadly into Giulietta’s exasperated face, and reached behind the door for her coat. ‘I thought we might go for a walk instead.’ Giulietta, already dripping as she stood on the threshold, now looked at her as if she’d lost her marbles. ‘Boboli, I thought.’

The Piazza d’Azeglio, of course, Sandro knew of old, its massive blackened facades and the old families nursing their declining fortunes behind them, but Iris March came as a surprise.

There was a light on behind the door to Giovanna Badigliani’s dismal ground-floor apartments, but Sandro walked straight past, having no wish to waste time with the poisonous old creature. At the clang of the ancient elevator grille as he reached the first floor Iris March opened her door and they were face to face.

The first thing he had not expected was that she would be beautiful. The city was overflowing with nice-looking foreign girls, he was used to them: pretty teenagers with streaked hair and bare arms and youth on their side, but beautiful was something else. Her broad, pale face, her freckles, her big, light eyes that slanted at an odd angle to the long straight nose, the width of her white shoulders like a Greek marble from the sea bed; the girl standing in front of him was in a class of her own. It occurred to him that not everyone would find her beautiful, but Sandro was glad Luisa wasn’t there with her beady eye to note how he fumbled for the first words he had to say to Iris March.

He spoke in the best English he could manage; it might be clumsy, but it somehow covered his awkwardness.

‘Miss March? I am pleased to meet you, finally.’

As she led him impatiently inside the big cold dark hallway, Sandro had time to tell himself to grow up and find his tongue. And then when she pointed at the ticket lying on top of the holdall, Iris March’s beauty was forgotten entirely. This meant something more urgent.

‘She’d have had to be at the airport at two,’ he said, and Iris March nodded eagerly.

‘Yes,’ she said, ‘that’s what I thought. It means -’

‘It means we know that whatever happened to her happened between 11.25 and, say, one o’clock. When she’d have left for the airport, assuming she was going to call back here for the bag.’

‘One-thirty, maybe,’ said Iris March, and that was another unexpected thing about her, the precision. ‘She liked – likes to cut things fine.’ He guessed at the meaning of that phrase, accurately.

‘OK,’ he said, moving through the door into the
salotto
where there
seemed to be some light at least and gesturing to her to sit down. His phone bleeped; message from Luisa. He put it away without reading it.

‘Have you looked through it?’ he asked. ‘The bag?’ She nodded.

‘Clothes,’ she said. ‘A painting set. Washbag. Passport.’ She faltered.

From her stricken face he could see that where he had taken the presence of the ticket instantly as something useful, narrowing down the timescale of Veronica Hutton’s disappearance, to Iris March it had meant something else. It meant that this was real, and that there had been some kind of holiday, romantic or otherwise, planned by Iris’s friend but now there was proof that she had not made it. She was not sitting on some terrace sipping spumante.