The Drowning River (40 page)

But there was no answer.

Anna Massi had laughed that girlish laugh, straight off, when Iris said it. They were both on their feet now.

‘Oh, you silly girl,’ she’d said. ‘Did you think I didn’t know?’

Her English was good; her husband had been right. She seemed like a different person; her eyes glittered. ‘Do you think she was the first?’

Inside the dark apartment Iris heard the squeal of the street doorbell, but she couldn’t move. ‘Sit down,’ said Anna Massi, and there was something in her voice that made it impossible for Iris to disobey. She sat; Anna Massi settled herself decorously beside her.

‘She was a stupid child. Imagining she was an artist’s muse, no doubt!’

And she laughed again, only this time Iris heard it differently. It was as though the sound had brought something into focus in her frantically calculating brain. She’s crazy, she thought, and then she thought of Giovanna Badigliani; saying to Paolo Massi, ‘Your wife was looking well,’ in that knowing way. Telling him that she knew his wife was unhinged; telling him in the same breath that she’d seen her.

‘It was you,’ said Iris. ‘You came to the apartment. You unplugged the computer.’

And Anna Massi had tilted her head on one side, black-eyed and curious as a bird after a worm, and Iris, mesmerized, felt the cold hand creep back across hers but could not look down at it.

The laugh had turned breathy. ‘A wife protects her husband,’ she said.

Iris had a hand to her mouth. ‘What do you mean?’ she whispered. ‘What have you done?’ It was as though she was in a dream, and wanted to scream but no sound came out.

A new edge entered Anna Massi’s voice; a kind of petulance. ‘She should not have been there. She shouldn’t have come to the gallery and showed her silly face to me.’ She laughed. ‘Paolo tried to stop me going after her but he didn’t understand. I cannot – there are certain things I cannot allow.’

‘You mean, as long as you didn’t have to know,’ said Iris, falteringly. ‘As long as he was – discreet.’

Anna Massi gave her a long, considering look. ‘The woman from Alitalia who telephoned, even she knew; she was laughing at me, asking me if I thought they should be seated together. Of course, I had to speak to him: I had to go to the gallery.’

Eyes wide, Iris kept silent. The gallery beside the Boboli. ‘And then she was there, waving through the window. Paolo ran out to get rid of her, but I’d seen her. He told me she’d gone, into the Boboli. And when I came into the gardens, through the back of the gallery – ha! There she was, walking just in front of me, up the hill. Then it was simple, I had only to follow her, and then, when she arrived at the Kaffehaus to meet that foolish old man, I simply sat behind them. She didn’t know me – and he couldn’t remember if he knew me or not!’

She laughed unpleasantly, leaning in towards Iris, and then Anna Massi’s stealthy hands were on her again, just bones, light and cool. Iris kept very still. It had come back to her, too late, that Anna Massi was strong; hadn’t she walked a hundred kilometres on her pilgrimage with a forty-kilo pack? And now the woman’s thin, cold hands were closing around Iris’s wrists in a grip so tight it was inhuman, like wire. She wanted to scream, Where is she? Where is Ronnie? But she had to wait.

‘Old man? What secrets?’ Iris didn’t understand. Something came to her. ‘She was meeting a painter. Claudio someone.’

‘Claudio Gentileschi.’ Anna Massi made a little pout. ‘It was business: you would not understand. Perhaps she thought he was a real painter, not a cheap little Jewish forger.’

Iris felt her scalp prickle at the ugly insult. ‘What were you going to do?’ she whispered.

Anna Massi’s head tilted towards her, that predatory bird again. ‘I was waiting,’ she said. ‘I thought, I will know, when the time comes; I was powerful, listening to the two of them, and they didn’t know I was there. Do you believe in fate?’

Iris stared at her, unable to speak.
She is mad.

‘Oh, I do,’ Anna Massi didn’t need an answer. ‘When I heard him tell her, that stupid, senile old goat, heard him telling her all our secrets, of course then I had to act. She wasn’t important, she was nothing, but when it ended, her little fling with Paolo, her little Sicilian honeymoon, because he always ends it – then she might tell someone. I couldn’t let that happen, not again.’ She drew herself up. ‘And then I knew what to do, to stop it.’

She gazed off through the window to the night sky, where sirens came and went in the darkness. Then she turned back to look into Iris’s eyes and when she spoke she was full of triumph and exuberant, as though she’d never been listened to before.

‘It was so easy! I simply accused him of touching her improperly.’ She smiled beatifically, a wide joyful smile.

‘Oh, the way he looked at me when I told him to get his hands off her, as if he really had touched her; full of panic, full of guilt!’ Her laugh was almost merry. ‘And then instead of defending himself, he ran away, so incriminating, and she after him. Oh, and when I said – it just came to me, also fate, don’t you think? – don’t you remember, your wife’s dead, such a face! You silly old fool, you lecherous old goat, you might as well be dead yourself.’ She spread her long fingers in a throwaway gesture. ‘What had I to lose? Even if he didn’t do what I wanted him to do and just disappear, just go and kill himself, who would believe a senile old man?’

‘You told him his wife had died?’ whispered Iris, trying to understand the casual cruelty of it, knowing that she must not cry.

Anna Massi shrugged. ‘What good was he in the world? Everyone knew he was losing his mind, Paolo had told me, we might not be able to use him any more. And of course then I understood that the police would believe that if he was demented, he might do – anything. Might molest a girl; most men would, even him, given the opportunity, a little
whore like that offering herself on a plate. No marriage is perfect, why should his be? Even if that old fool of a wife might have thought she was all in all to him.’

Claudio Gentileschi had loved his wife: that much Iris remembered. Anna Massi pursed her lips.

‘It was when I took her
telefonino
and smashed it, that frightened him, and he ran away.’ Iris thought of the violence with which that phone had been destroyed. She was afraid herself; she would run away now, if she could. She looked towards the door.

Anna Massi didn’t seem to see where Iris was looking; she drew a breath, a satisfied sigh. ‘And then, to deal with Paolo’s little whore was not difficult. She was afraid of me, you see, when I told her who I was. She was crying; she was guilty, and she knew it. And I know where to walk in that place, not to be seen. I told her I was taking her back to the gallery, and she came; only a small amount of force was necessary. I took her back the same way I came, back to the gallery, where she will be punished, as a child. And then. . .’ She made a magician’s gesture in the air, letting Iris’s hands drop. ‘She is gone. I make her disappear.’ She stood, took a pace or two towards a massive stone fireplace.

‘I return for Claudio Gentileschi later; Paolo has told me of the bar where he takes a drink after work every day, before he goes back to his wife. Maybe he will be there. And it was fate: he was there. I told him again why there was no point in going home. I could smell whisky on his breath.’ She reached for something on the mantelpiece, and held it up. ‘He even gave me his keys.’

Iris struggled with the information; she could not bear to stop and think about it because it wasn’t Claudio she needed to know about. Her wrists were free and she knew she should run and she would, but first she had to know.

‘Where did you put her?’ she said, hearing herself close to begging, close to crying. ‘What do you mean, you punished her, like a child? She was harmless, you didn’t need to be jealous of Ronnie.’

And then the sob rose in her throat, when she saw what she had done. Too late.

‘You think I would be jealous?’ Anna Massi said with soft, whispering fury and seized her, forced her back down, her mouth so close to Iris that Iris could smell her breath, slightly sour, the chemical smell of madness, of medication, of something wrong deep down. ‘He always comes back.’

Over Anna Massi’s head a mirrored dreamcatcher swayed and tinkled, and beside her elbow the grey filament of smoke from an incense cone spiralled into the air, chokingly sweet. Iris thought she didn’t want these to be the last things she saw and smelled; she squeezed her eyes shut.

‘He always comes back?’ She forced the words out. ‘To this horrible place? Well, more fool him.’ And as one of Anna Massi’s hands moved to her throat she found she couldn’t even cry out, any more, for the open spaces, for hills and trees, to be out of this great, dark, wet, suffocating doom-laden city, to be home with Ma.

The doorbell screeched again, a desperate, protracted, sound: too late, thought Iris, as the blood pulsed behind her eyelids.

His new-found confidence evaporated, Jackson was about to turn and go – to the nearest police station, or where? He had no idea – only then the door opened in his face and a middle-aged man came out. The man gave him a curious look, but he didn’t pull the door shut behind him, only let it swing slowly shut.

Jackson put out a hand to hold it, just in time. He was inside.

‘So What Did You do with the body?’

As Sandro spoke, Paolo Massi sat at the desk, summoning up some ghastly imitation of composure. He didn’t reply, but Sandro saw he was trying to rebuild his position.

Sandro held up the single caramel-coloured hair. ‘She was here, and now she’s gone.’

They stared at each other, then Massi spoke. ‘That’s not evidence,’ he said, his voice oddly high-pitched. ‘She was a student, she had been here to the gallery as had all the students, one hair is not evidence. I had nothing to do with her disappearance. You should find her, then you will have evidence.’ He rattled off his defence, ending with something like the old sneer, then he clamped his mouth shut.

‘I’ll find her,’ said Sandro, slowly. ‘I’ll find her all right.’ He turned on his heel, walked along the row of artworks, staring blindly at them, a tinted ink sketch of the Santo Spirito, a muddy little oil he couldn’t even make out. He concentrated on what he knew; they had kept her here.

He turned back to face his audience enclosed in the blood-red room, Giulietta and Luisa, watching him intently from the door to the street, Antonella Scarpa in the shadows, and at the centre of the picture Paolo Massi, downlit, and under interrogation.

‘Stay there,
she must have said,
Stay right where you are,
and you did what you were told. Sat obediently at your fine desk, as Gabi over the road will testify, until she came back.’

Nobody moved. Sandro continued, following his thread through the dark.

‘You must have heard them, first, sitting there; you must have heard her dragging Veronica down from the Boboli, through that gate, inside. Your wife must have managed to manhandle her all the way down here after she saw Claudio off. Strong woman, is she? Not only cleverer than you, but stronger?’ Sandro paused to consider the fine-boned features he’d seen in the photograph on Massi’s desk; they could be made of steel, those pretty, highly strung women.

‘Did she even let you see the girl? Or did she just lock her in there, in the dark? Did she tie her up? Or did you do it together? You must have helped her, mustn’t you? Are you afraid of your wife?’ Paolo Massi’s twitching face as Sandro spoke told him that he was right.

‘I suppose she might have been dead by then,’ Sandro continued regardless. ‘But I don’t think so. There are scuff marks, and nothing else; killing tends to leave a trace of one kind or another.’ He paused, to observe Paolo Massi’s reaction; the man’s eyes were wide and fixed, as if the idea of death had only just occurred to him.

Sandro went on. ‘You kept her here – how long? Did you have a row, about what she’d done, about the right thing to do next?’ He paused. ‘Did your wife tell you what she’d overheard? Did she say, with Veronica Hutton out of sight, so you didn’t have to look at her, bound and gagged in that hole, did she say,
I’m going after the old man
? Or something like that. Because by then it was too late, she had to get him to shut up.’

‘I don’t know what she did,’ said Massi, pale. ‘She went out, she said she was – she was getting me something to eat. I can’t be responsible – I didn’t know where she went.’

Sandro looked at him with disgust. ‘She left Veronica Hutton locked in that room, that – that cupboard, where she might have suffocated, and she went out in the car to find Claudio Gentileschi,
to finish him off. How did she find him? I imagine you must have told her where to look. Did she mean to drive him to suicide, or just to discredit him? The result was the same, wasn’t it?’

He paused to watch Massi’s composure disintegrate. ‘Was she crying, little Veronica Hutton? Did she beg you to let her out? Or was she already dead?’

Massi’s lip trembled, ‘No, no, she. . .’ And he faltered, his eyes filling up, overflowing with self-pity.

Sandro took a step towards him, then no further. ‘You were too frightened of your wife, weren’t you? Did she say, too late to let her go now, think of everything she might say? No one would suspect us, pillars of the community; let the senile old man take the blame, alive or dead.’

Massi swallowed, and Sandro moved on; his end was in sight and he would not stop for anyone.

‘She was seen leaving here by Gabi over the road, in the car; then she was seen talking to Claudio on the Lungarno Santa Rosa, a witness. . .’ and he paused a moment, thinking of the boy, because Massi didn’t need to know what kind of witness he was ‘. . .a witness saw them. Will identify her.’ He barely drew breath. ‘What would your father have thought, eh? Persuading an old man to kill himself, to save your shoddy little business, sucking up to foreigners, selling fakes, sleeping with girls young enough to be your daughter?’

Paolo Massi remained quiet, though behind him Sandro heard Antonella Scarpa make a small sound of self-disgust.