The Drowning River (27 page)

The old woman puffed herself up. ‘This is my house,’ she said. ‘I admit whom I wish. And while we are speaking of these things, I do not permit the visits of young men, who leave in the middle of the night.’

Iris froze, furious; she expected the blush but it didn’t come. Slowly and deliberately she closed the door on the Contessa Badigliani’s nasty old face, then rested her back on the door. Behind her there was an outraged muttering, some threatening Italian, a silence, then the clang of the elevator door.

Iris got her bag, her keys, her phone. She texted Hiroko:
on my way.

She called a cab.

Sandro noticed straight away that no expense was spared at the Scuola Massi. The entrance was in a narrow, pretty street between the church of San Niccolò and the peeling burnt-orange stucco of the Palazzo Serristori. It was one of the highest-priced areas of the city, and the most picturesque, even in the November rain. Perfect for making a good impression on foreign visitors, as was the facade of the school, which was newly painted in rich ochre, the
pietra serena
around windows and doors wire-brushed and pristine, and the brass nameplate gleaming.

When he had come blearily to the phone that morning, Pietro hadn’t had much to say, or at least not on the subject of the investigation into the finances of the art school.

It had been inconclusive; there were country properties that had aroused suspicion but none of them were in Massi’s own name; the school did well, every course fully subscribed, some students even came back for several years running, three of the big American universities used the place exclusively. The art school enjoyed
goodwill, because the Massi family had that record during the war, the father printing leaflets in his cellar for the partisans. Of course they were doing well, and if the Guardia didn’t dig too far down to investigate whether all those students actually existed, well, they were a busy bunch. A huge corruption case had erupted while the investigation had been going on, half the officers had been transferred to it, and the whole thing petered out.

‘Plus,’ Pietro had said almost as an afterthought, ‘it was a woman denounced him to the Guardia.’

‘So what? Sandro had said.

‘Come off it,’ Pietro had said. ‘You know what that means. Ex-girlfriend, spurned lover, whatever. Ulterior motive.’ ‘They know that for sure?’

Sandro could picture Pietro’s world-weary shrug. ‘She started as a life model for the school then started doing bits of work for him, and I believe it might have turned into something more, very briefly. I gather he’s rather attractive to the ladies.’

‘Ah,’ Sandro had said, filing this little nugget away for possible future use. Gossip never quite counted as fact, but it sometimes led somewhere, all the same.

‘Did you have any feeling, though,’ he had asked Pietro, ‘for whether they had cause for the tax fraud investigation?’

‘I don’t like the man,’ Pietro had said. ‘So I’d have pursued it.’

The woman who let Sandro in – Antonella Scarpa, as she introduced herself with a firm, dry handshake – struck him as exactly the kind of woman a jealous wife would select as a secretary, for example, if she wanted to keep her husband out of trouble. Crop-haired, handsome enough, slight but severe in her white coat. She reminded him of something or someone, but he couldn’t think what. A police technician, maybe, with that serious look; then again perhaps he was recognizing a type, clever, tough, hard-working: balls of steel, gender notwithstanding. The archetypal Italian female.

‘The director is not here yet,’ Scarpa said. ‘He thinks perhaps five minutes? The traffic is bad on the
viale,
with all the rain.’ Sandro grunted in sympathy.

As the woman led him inside, through the stone-vaulted entrance hall where uplighters shone on a series of – even to Sandro’s untrained eye – exquisite engravings of Florentine landmarks, he remembered where he’d seen her before. He was good like that; the memory would always click into place, in the end. He’d seen Antonella Scarpa only yesterday, hanging paintings in a gallery in the Via Romana.

‘You’ve got a gallery space, too, am I right?’ he asked casually, and Scarpa turned to look at him over her shoulder.

‘Yes,’ she said politely, as if talking to a prospective customer. ‘We exhibit students’ work there at the end of their course.’

‘Is it also run commercially?’ he asked. It was surely too grand a premises just for student efforts.

They had come to a small lobby with low seating and she gestured to him to sit down.

‘Yes, of course,’ she said. ‘We sell. Can I offer you a cup of coffee?’

While she fetched the coffee, Sandro tried to think of a way of putting her at her ease. Five minutes wasn’t much time to extract information from a tenaciously loyal and fiercely discreet employee – and even in the few moments he had had to observe Antonella Scarpa he had registered these characteristics – but it might bear fruit.

‘Have you been with the Massi school for long?’ he asked, by way of preamble.

‘Eight years,’ she said. So she arrived the year after the tax case. Is she in love with Massi, thought Sandro, and doesn’t know it herself? Eight years as a married man’s sidekick. He didn’t have to ask if she had a family of her own, because she was here, wasn’t she? On a Sunday. He looked around; there was a wall of glass beyond which he could see a vaulted studio space; it looked as though she had been halfway through setting up easels around a podium.

‘Do you usually work Sundays?’ he asked, and she shrugged.

‘Now and then,’ she said. ‘It’s hard to get things done with all the students here.’

Cluttering up the place, thought Sandro; maybe she’s really interested in the other side of the business. ‘What kind of art do you sell?’ he asked. ‘In the gallery?’

Standing with arms folded while he sat, she looked at him curiously. ‘Do you – excuse me -’ she said, ‘do you know anything about fine art?’

Sandro shrugged, smiling amiably. ‘Not really,’ he said. ‘Humour me.’

Scarpa looked at him sternly. ‘We source original drawings and engravings of the Renaissance for international dealers,’ she said, ‘for the most part American and German, although increasingly we have some Russian clients,’ as if reading from a rubric. ‘And we are dealers for some contemporary painters and conceptual artists.’ She mentioned a few names, which he noted, but Sandro had never heard of any of them. Conceptual art, as far as he knew, was a matter of pigs’ heads and wrapping the Ponte Vecchio in tinfoil; was there money in that?

‘I must come and have a look,’ he said. ‘Would that be permitted?’ It seemed to him that Antonella Scarpa’s attention sharpened at the request.

‘I’m sure,’ she said warily.

‘Maybe this afternoon,’ mused Sandro, as if to himself. Was she being professionally tight-lipped, protective, or something more? ‘A bit of a treat for a rainy Sunday.’ And he smiled at her.

‘Well, you’d have to talk to the Direttore about that,’ she said with alarm, and in response to that hint of panic in her voice he resolved that that was precisely what he would do, although whether out of a desire to cause trouble or sound detective instinct he couldn’t have said. And then on cue the grating sound of an iron key in the heavy lock interrupted them.

Paolo Massi was handsome in the Florentine patrician manner, and Sandro took an immediate dislike to him, from the hand he held out, unsmiling, to the wings of distinguished dark and silver hair, to the deepset green eyes. Sandro gave the offered hand the briefest of touches.

‘I want to be every help I can,’ said Massi earnestly, ushering Sandro into his office, which was on a mezzanine floor up a flight of iron stairs. From where he sat Sandro could see out through the studio space and into the courtyard beyond, where some large gardenias in pots were dripping in the rain. Sandro imagined the space full of bowed heads, eager foreign girls labouring away at their easels.

What did they come here for, these girls? Romance? Escape from the parents or the school, a bit of instant growing up?

‘Of course,’ he said, not thinking, to Paolo Massi. He transferred his gaze from the studio to the interior of the man’s office; another row of beautifully framed pictures, pages from a mediaeval manuscript of some kind. A desk with nothing on it but a photograph in a silver frame, of the wife. A bit of a beauty, dark hair and eyes, fine nose; Luisa had been right.

‘What do
you
think’s happened to her?’ asked Sandro, on impulse, as if confiding in the man, ‘because the police and the mother don’t seem to be all that worried, so far. They seemed to think it would be characteristic of the girl to – well, just bunk off for a bit. Have something of an adventure.’

Aren’t you worried? he wanted to say. What if some lunatic’s got her in his cellar? Massi looked down his nose. Sandro wanted to shake him by the throat.

‘I just don’t know,’ said Massi eventually. ‘I suppose we have to consider the fact that harm might have come to her.’ He looked grave. ‘But isn’t there the hope – I mean, there’s still the hope that it could be some – man? That she’s gone off on some holiday?’

Sandro nodded noncommittally. ‘Do you think that would be typical? I mean, did you get to know her at all?’ he said mildly. ‘Did you get that impression of her, that she was wild?’

Massi looked at him, and sighed. ‘I can really only talk of her as a student of art,’ he said. ‘I can tell you that she wanted to be good but she wasn’t used to hard work. She liked to enjoy herself; she was impulsive. One day she wanted to be a great painter. . .’ and he spread his hands ‘. . . the next she wanted to stay awake for twenty-four hours drinking with strangers.’ He hesitated. ‘It’s not uncommon.’

He seemed to be trying hard.

‘So you think she was impulsive enough, what, to just run away?’

‘There are so many students,’ he said, spreading his hands. ‘You know, she seemed a nice enough girl. Many of them are impulsive, or lazy; they are very young.’ There was something studied, Sandro thought, about his cool manner; distancing himself already, he thought, in case of any bad publicity.

‘I bet they cause you any amount of trouble,’ said Sandro, trying to sound sympathetic. ‘Not turning up, that kind of thing.’

‘It happens,’ said Massi curtly. ‘We make every effort to keep attendance good.’ There was a silence during which Sandro heard the rain pattering on the glass roof of the studio’s extension. He hoped Luisa and Giulietta were under cover somewhere, whatever Luisa was up to. Then he thought, what am I doing here? Trying to work out if this man’s defrauding the state? Not my job.

His job was to ask about Ronnie.

‘Where were you, then?’ he asked, ‘the day she was last seen?’ He didn’t even know why he asked the question, except that he didn’t like Massi, he wanted to provoke some reaction. ‘You were here, I suppose? Didn’t you ask where she was?’

‘No, I wasn’t here,’ said Massi, frowning ominously.

‘You were away?’

‘I was hanging a show,’ he said. ‘I’ve been there most of this week. Taking down an exhibit of installations we had for the beginning of term, so that we could begin to hang the students’ work.’

Sandro brushed the information aside, refusing to show that he had no idea what an installation was, and got to the point.

‘Were you alone, on that particular day?’

Massi stared at him, then laughed. ‘Are you asking me for an alibi, Mr Cellini? I mean, isn’t that a matter for the police?’

‘I asked if you were alone,’ said Sandro calmly. ‘I was a police officer myself until fairly recently, if that makes any difference.’

Paolo Massi swivelled on his chair and looked down through the glass wall into the studio space. Following his gaze, Sandro could see Antonella Scarpa looking back up at them, hands in the pockets of her long white coat. Was it just that he’d seen her before, in the gallery, or was it something else about her that bothered him? And without any conscious decision on Sandro’s part, in his head the old machinery of professional suspicion began to turn. He couldn’t hurry it, it would tick down in its own time until it decided: was this little itch of doubt something, or nothing?

‘Early retirement?’ Massi asked coolly, interrupting his thoughts. ‘From the force?’

Sandro ignored him. ‘So you were alone? All day?’

‘As a matter of fact I was not,’ said Massi through gritted teeth. ‘Not all day, anyway.’ He drew himself up in the chair, fine-boned, aristocratic; Luisa should be here, thought Sandro, to give her verdict on this man, as he was no longer able to control his prejudice.

‘Dottoressa Scarpa came over to see me, in the morning,’ he said. ‘To give a hand; there was a lot of work to do. The students were visiting a potter’s studio at that time, so she was able to come away.’

Sandro nodded just slightly. ‘She was with you from what time until what time?’ he asked.

‘An hour and a half? I really can’t remember the exact timing,’ said Massi, frowning. ‘My wife arrived. She brought me lunch.’

‘That’s nice,’ said Sandro. The wife arrives, the other one leaves. ‘Does she do that often?’

‘Whenever she can,’ said Massi. ‘We like to eat together.’

‘And you were in the gallery the whole day?’

Massi nodded. ‘Yes.’ He smiled politely, patiently, as if he could spend all day having this kind of conversation. A man used to dealing with clients.

Suddenly Sandro was itching to get out of this place; what was the point of winding the man up when they didn’t even know what time the girl went missing? When the lead he should be following was the possibility that Veronica Hutton might have set off that morning to meet Claudio Gentileschi? He hadn’t the shadow of a doubt that this Paolo Massi was capable of defrauding the taxman – he was clever enough, and arrogant enough. As for dishonest enough, well, who wouldn’t cheat if they could get away with it?

As Massi led him out Sandro slowed his pace, to have one last look around. It was beautiful, certainly, very tasteful, the dark wooden work tables, the creamy plastered vaulting, the displays of old etching equipment and even an antique printing press; perhaps the very one Massi’s father had kept running through the war. An old family, a good family; but perhaps family didn’t count for everything.