The Drowning River (7 page)

‘Sorry,’ she said. ‘What did you say?’

‘I asked when you last saw Ronnie,’ he said. ‘Or when you last spoke to her.’

Iris felt cold and sweaty at the same time.

‘I last saw her the morning after Halloween,’ she said slowly. ‘We had a Halloween thing at our flat. A party.’

An absolutely rubbish, dismal party, she wanted to say, thinking of the American boy, and no one nice came.

‘On Monday, then,’ said Massi. ‘And you last saw her on Tuesday morning.’

Iris nodded, staring at him, trying to think. ‘She was in bed,’ she said. ‘I came here. To the school. The morning we went to the pottery class.’

‘And you told Antonella she wasn’t well,’ said Massi flatly.

Embarrassed at the lie, Iris shrugged uncomfortably. ‘She had a hangover,’ she said. ‘She really didn’t look that great.’ Actually, she’d been fine. Sitting up in bed, looking excited.

Massi turned and relayed the information succinctly to the tall carabiniere, who nodded. ‘You were here on Tuesday?’ she heard the policeman ask him. ‘In the school?’

Massi looked at him curiously. ‘I was hanging an exhibition,’ he said. ‘In our gallery. All week, in fact.’

Plenty of people weren’t in that day, thought Iris defensively; it was only a visit to a potter in Fiesole. Practically optional; Antonella had even left them to it and come back to the school.

The policeman nodded. ‘So you didn’t know Miss Hutton was not attending her classes?’

‘Antonella might have mentioned it,’ said Massi, frowning. ‘Veronica would not have been the first student to play truant; obviously we do our best. We have excellent results.’ He sounded defensive.

‘But you yourself were not here. You were not teaching.’

‘No,’ said Massi, sounding angry.

Uncomfortably Iris watched them. Sooner or later she’d just have to say. She took a deep breath.

‘I knew she wouldn’t be in this week,’ she said, looking down into her lap with shame. ‘Well, no, actually I thought it would be a couple of days, but you know. . .’ She’d been going to say,
you know Ronnie,
but for some reason the phrase raised panic in her. ‘She said she was going off to stay with some friends of her mother’s.’ The name of the place came to her, and then the name of the friends. ‘The Hertfords,’ she said, almost triumphant until she checked herself. ‘In Greve.’

Massi gave her a look, half-dubious, it seemed to Iris. ‘Ah, well,’ he said with false joviality, ‘there’s the answer.’ Did he still not believe her?

‘It seems she’s in Chianti,’ he said, turning to the policemen, explaining. They seemed to relax, almost grow impatient as they talked back to him. Massi turned again to Iris.

‘You’ve spoken to her since she got there? She didn’t mention her bag?’

‘I, um, I – well, no,’ said Iris slowly, feeling the panic rise in her again at the question.

‘That is, I called her a couple of times, but there wasn’t – it said the number wasn’t active. Or something. Sometimes – well, if there’s no signal?’

They asked for Ronnie’s number, and the network she used, and then it dawned on Iris that the phone hadn’t been in her bag, had it? Which was odd because that was where she usually kept it, but perhaps she’d had it in a pocket, or perhaps the person who took her bag only wanted the phone. Iris felt her head hurt with the possibilities. Why take the phone and not the money? It occurred to Iris that the keys to the apartment weren’t in the bag, either.

So Ronnie had her phone, and her keys. That was better.

‘We could try her again,’ she said, pulling out her phone and dialling before they could stop her. That would be the way to deal with this. Please, she repeated in her head as she waited, Just speak, Ronnie, just answer. Just let me hear your voice, one more time. And only later did she think that it was then, listening to the dead air before she heard the wooden Italian recorded message once again, that she knew something was wrong.

‘Would any wife believe it?’ asked Luisa, arms folded. ‘That her husband would commit suicide?’

‘Sit down,’ said Sandro impatiently, pulling her chair out. Between them on the kitchen table was a dish of pappardelle with hare sauce, his favourite, the pasta ribbons glossy with meat juices. The kitchen was warm, the overhead light low over the table which was laid as always, cloth, clean glasses, water jug, napkins. It had lifted him just to see it, but Luisa’s reaction could capsize the whole mood. ‘It’ll get cold,’ he said, mildly.

Sandro had been looking forward to this, all the way back. As though by prior arrangement the rain had stopped briefly and he walked home by moonlight. Through the great emptiness of the Piazza del Carmine, its cobbles gleaming; when he reached the great dark palaces of the Via
Santo Spirito and saw silvery light shining down its majestic length, the Florence he recognized, then he began to return to himself. Halfway down a photographic hoarding was suspended from a facade; peering at it, Sandro saw that it showed an image of the great flood of 1966. November 1966: the photograph was of a pile of rubble up against a shopfront, and a car overturned in a tide of sludge. Sandro had been eighteen, and on military service; he had not yet met Luisa.

Walking on, he could see them now, the waters that had risen, stealthily, unstoppably, four decades before, up to the
piano nobile,
washing through ancient cellars. Remembered the mud and filth it had left behind and the months of back-breaking work of hauling and sluicing and rebuilding, the trucks full of ruined worldly goods parked everywhere, and men crying in the streets. And briefly Sandro marvelled at how the city had survived. How he had survived, the eighteen-year-old Sandro full of frustration and temper and irresolution; he’d found himself a job, a life; he’d found Luisa, and held on to her. Like the clean-up of the city, it had turned out to be a matter of hard work all along.

In the kitchen Luisa sighed, and sat. In silence she served them, then started, as Sandro lifted the fork to his lips. He heard her out, chewing thoughtfully.

‘However bad it got, how could you make yourself believe it? That the one you had lived with for all that time, the love of your life, would just, just – leave you? Abandon you?’

Alarmed, Sandro nodded, trying to work out where this outburst had come from. He put his fork down carefully. ‘Eat,’ he said. ‘It’s so good. And you look worn out.’

It was true; Luisa was pale, her eyelids were dark and heavy. She made a sound of frustration, but she began to eat. It was the best strategy against Luisa’s outrage, the threat of letting food spoil. She eyed him as she ate, but he saw her grow calmer. Then he understood; it seemed so long ago to him, but clearly not to Luisa.

‘Oh, that,’ he said impatiently. ‘I know. I was never going to do away with myself, you know that.’ Her eyes narrowed, dangerously. Carefully Sandro poured her half a glass of the very nice Brunello Pietro had given them. He had connections down in the Val D’Orcia; a nephew
drove for one of the winemakers, who’d lost his licence. Luisa exhaled, took a sip of the wine, softened.

‘You say that now, Sandro. I think you’ve forgotten.’

Maybe it was true; maybe he had forgotten. He’d certainly been in a state two years ago when the body of the child’s killer was found, when questions started to get asked at Porta al Prato, and Sandro had decided to head off on his lone mission, like John Wayne. Knowing he would be out of the force when they found out what he’d done. When they caught up with him. Had he intended to do himself in? He’d be lying if he said it hadn’t gone through his mind, but that wasn’t the same thing. There was planning involved; you’d have to think of who found the body, how to manage it without too much mess. Or too much pain.

As if she knew what he was thinking, Luisa said, ‘How would you have done it?’ Her voice was rough; she was still angry with him for putting her through those twenty-four hours of worry, just for that thought passing through his mind. ‘I wouldn’t have done it,’ he said quietly. ‘I would never have done it.’

She said nothing. He shrugged, uncomfortable. ‘Not pills,’ he said uneasily. ‘Something very quick. Instantaneous.’ She knew they were both thinking about his gun, police issue. ‘But we’re not talking about me, Luisa. I would never do it.’ Her hand lay on the table, and for a moment he laid his hand on top of it.

What he did not add was that he would not have taken pills, but neither would he have filled his pockets with stones and walked into the muddy Arno below the shacks and tipped rubbish of the Lungarno Santa Rosa. Down in the muck with river vermin swimming over you. He would never have done what Claudio Gentileschi had done.

Pietro had called back, eventually.

‘The guy was a serious depressive,’ he’d said. ‘I’m sorry, Sandro, we talked to the doctor. He fought it all his life; he must have just got tired of fighting.’ Sandro heard him let out a heavy sigh. ‘You know – the camps. He was in the camps, that kind of thing – well. I don’t think they ever leave it behind.’

Sandro knew Pietro was thinking of that writer, who’d been in the camps, written about the camps, then thrown himself down the stairs
in Turin forty years on. But Pietro’s assumption niggled at him; no two men are the same, not even if they’ve survived the same horrors. He said nothing.

Pietro went on, earnest. ‘Maybe something happened, some little thing, the straw that breaks the camel’s back, who knows? Come on, Sandro; you know as well as I do. It happens all the time. Suicide.’

There’d been a silence then. ‘First job, eh?’ Pietro said, trying to buck him up. ‘Nice one, Sandro, you’re back in the saddle, anyway.’

They’d finished by making their usual arrangement to meet. Sandro knew Pietro was trying to convince him he’d got a future, but perversely it had the opposite effect; the kinder Pietro was, the more he remembered he could have lost his friend his job. For a whole day after Sandro had gone AWOL – with a loaded police gun – Pietro had scrambled to cover for him. Had lied for him; could still be disciplined for it, too, if anyone in the system took against him.

‘I’m not saying people don’t commit suicide,’ said Luisa, now standing to clear the plates. ‘I’m saying the ones they leave behind don’t want to believe it. I’m saying that it’s natural to deny it.’

Sandro nodded, but he wasn’t sure if Luisa would say the same, had she met Lucia Gentileschi. They couldn’t have been less physically alike – he thought this observing Luisa at the sink, her hair as black and glossy as when he’d first met her, her shoulders plump, hips wide and strong – but Claudio Gentileschi’s widow was a woman in the same mould as Luisa herself.

‘They
said
he’d killed himself?’ he’d asked her as gently as he could, sitting there with her straight back in the room filled with pale November light. She seemed to be permanently bracing herself against something. ‘You don’t believe them?’

She took a while before answering him. ‘I don’t know,’ she said at last. ‘I mean, no, I don’t, of course I don’t believe them, that is my first reaction. I knew him, you see. . .’ And at this her voice faltered, then recovered. ‘They – you – didn’t know Claudio.’ She nodded. ‘But I can see that perhaps, under the circumstances, I’m not thinking clearly.’ Sandro saw her eyes, fixed on some point through the window behind him, intent. ‘I have to be sure, you see,’ she went on. ‘I need to be convinced. Because I
cannot – I can’t. . .’ She gave a little gasp, drawing breath in. ‘I can’t really stand to think that he was in pain. Or that he was frightened.’

‘No,’ said Sandro, feeling a tightness in his own throat. ‘Of course not.’ He still didn’t know what she wanted of him. Lucia Gentileschi turned her head a little to transfer her gaze from the window at last to Sandro. He wanted to look away, as if from something very bright, but he did not.

She went on, determined. ‘The police won’t tell me that, of course; it isn’t part of their job to find that out, I suppose they aren’t like doctors, or priests. Or perhaps they think it wouldn’t be good for me to know the truth.’

Despite himself, Sandro nodded minutely; he knew well enough how much was never told to relatives. His heart sank at the thought that he was being offered an opportunity to make amends, to handle it right, this time; the problem was, he had no idea if he could manage it. What if the truth was intolerable? But Lucia Gentileschi – he couldn’t imagine ever being able to refer to her by her first name, or to use the informal,
tu
– was still looking at him, and now he could see that if anyone could handle it, she could.

‘You see,’ she said, ‘he was missing for a whole day. Eleven hours unaccounted for. The last time I saw him was at eight, when he left our apartment to buy the newspaper; they said he died at about seven in the evening.’ She paused; her eyelids fluttered. ‘They found his body the following morning.’ She took a sip of the water she still held in her hand, dutifully. All Sandro could think of was the night she must have spent without her husband; the first night alone in fifty years. How long it must have seemed.

And now sitting in his own warm kitchen and going over it again he understood what Luisa was saying; the night he’d stayed out, and those hours she hadn’t known if he was alive or dead, would not be easily forgotten. He stood up and went to the sink and folded his arms around her from behind, warm and solid against his chest, and for a second he felt her lean back against him.

‘So what are you going to do?’ Luisa sounded distracted, as if the feel of his arms around her shoulders had reminded her of
something else entirely. He set his cheek against her hair, breathing in her smell.

‘I’m going to see her tomorrow,’ he said. ‘In her – their apartment.’ He sighed, thinking of all the things Claudio Gentileschi’s wife had told him, and the things he had deduced without being told. That he had been a proud man; an intellectual, an artist. A loving man, though not good at expressing himself. A man who’d had dark moods but had been good at controlling them. A man who’d known that he was losing his faculties. And then there were those missing hours, Gentileschi’s last hours on earth, the absence that his wife could not ignore. ‘I need more information,’ he said. ‘I need to find out about the husband, of course. And I need to find out about her.’