The Drowning River

by Christobel Kent

  ‘Jesus,’ said Giulietta, tightening her grip on Luisa’s arm. ‘Let’s go.’

  But ahead of them the road was almost blocked by a great crowd at the foot of the Ponte Vecchio, a crowd of rubberneckers and innocents, scattered across the stationary traffic, surging and clamouring against a barrier where ten or fifteen policemen stood with arms folded.

  ‘How the hell are we going to get through?’ said Giulietta, and at her side Luisa suddenly felt so weak all she could do was sit down, there and then, on the streaming pavement.

  ‘Luisa,’ said Giulietta, on her knees beside her, and Luisa could hear the alarm in her voice.

  She took out her phone and pushed it at Giulietta. ‘Text him,’ she said. ‘Text Sandro.’

  The moment Paolo Massi answered his phone, Sandro knew he was guilty.

  The colour drained from his face as he stared down at the device’s tiny screen, while it continued to ring. He looked from Antonella Scarpa to Sandro, then put the phone to his ear and said, ‘Veronica?’ His voice was hollow with fear.

  Not shock, not anger at the trouble the girl had put them to, not joy that she was still alive, after all, but fear. As if he’d seen a ghost.

  ‘Veronica?’ he said again and this time it was with a hideous kind of false jaunty surprise that fooled no one.

  Sandro lunged for the phone and snatched it from him before he had a chance to protest. ‘Hello?’ he said sharply into the handset. ‘Signorina Hutton? Hello? Who is this?’ But the line was dead. Sandro closed his hand tight around the telephone, whipped it behind his back, out of Massi’s reach. Out of the corner of his eye he made sure of the whereabouts of Antonella Scarpa, under the light that led out to the back. She seemed rooted to the spot.

  ‘It was you,’ he said, looking at Massi. ‘It was you, wasn’t it?’

  Looking hollow-eyed and unshaven under the downlighters, the man tried a laugh, and Sandro took a threatening step towards him.

  ‘Don’t even start,’ he said. Massi took a step back, so he was right up against the wall, next to the drawing of the girl on her back.

  ‘Is that her?’ he asked, coming up close to the picture’s glass. ‘Who chose the drawing? It looks like Veronica Hutton.’

  Nobody said anything. Sandro shifted to face them again. ‘I don’t know how you did it,’ he said to Paolo Massi, ‘but you know she’s dead, don’t you? You know where Veronica Hutton is, because you put her there, and now you’re afraid she’s got out, she’s come back to haunt you.’

  ‘No,’ said Massi, ‘no -’ white as a sheet’- she’s not dead, it wasn’t me, I was here the whole time, at my desk the whole time, anyone can tell you. It wasn’t me – it was her, it wasn’t me -’

  In his pocket Sandro’s own phone bleeped – again? Messages. How could he look at messages now? But it could be Luisa. His stomach took a lurch; he should never have set them off on their own. He felt a moment of awful indecision; he saw the three of them shut inside this red-walled cavernous space, and Massi and Scarpa just waiting for his concentration to slip. Outside the rain and the traffic receded, as if they belonged to a world to which he might never return.

  Sandro reached inside his jacket to put Massi’s phone in his pocket, and took out his own, slowly, deliberately. He clicked on the touchpad with his thumb and then frowned. Two new messages. First message, received, porca miseria, an hour ago, from Iris March.

  Going over to see Massi, meet me there?

  To see Massi? Had she been at the school? What had they done with her?

  He raised his eyes from the screen and saw that they were still there, where he’d left them. Antonella Scarpa’s face was frozen in an expression of absolute denial.

  And from Luisa, two minutes ago. It was the woman in the Kaffeehaus, it read. The woman in the white coat. On our way.

  And there she was in front of him, Antonella Scarpa in her uniform. Her white work-coat.

  ‘What was that?’ he asked Paolo Massi. ‘Did you say it was her?’

  And he turned to Antonella Scarpa.

  ‘You did it for him, did you?’

  She was sallow with fear. ‘Paolo?’ she said, but Paolo Massi didn’t meet her eye.

  ‘The woman in the white coat?’ He gestured at her overall. ‘Seen at the Kaffeehaus? And Gabi over the road says she saw you leave; you were the one that left. You left, didn’t you, at just about the time some mystery customer stuck her head around the door? Gabi says you scared her off, you and Signora Massi. What did she come down for, then? Come to tell him she’d found out about his girlfriend – how did that happen? Was it the hotel called about their room, something like that? Or maybe she knew all along, she just came to make trouble.’ He stuck his hands in his pockets. ‘My guess is, Veronica Hutton wasn’t the first student he’d slept with, was she?’

  Antonella Scarpa’s eyes were dark pools; she stood her ground.

  Sandro went on, ‘And then suddenly there she is in the flesh, the girl: Veronica Hutton, sticking her head around the door and biting off more than she can chew?’

  Scarpa just shook her head.

  ‘That must have been the last straw, mustn’t it? Eight years of playing second fiddle to his wife and then he starts knocking off nineteen-year-old girls under your nose? Under both your noses? Did you think, Little whore? Did you rush off after her, did you follow her up to the Kaffeehaus and see her talking to Claudio Gentileschi, him spilling all your secrets? Was it money, or was it sex? Or was it a bit of both?’

  Antonella Scarpa seemed to have lost the power of speech.

  ‘Come on, defend her,’ said Sandro, turning to Paolo Massi. ‘If you were a real man you’d find something to say. Where would you be without your little powerhouse here? She gave me a nice spiel about the company this morning, she stood guard over your reputation like the little Sarda terrier she is. She was going to cover for you all last week while you pretended you were in Sicily, talking to dealers.’ He paused for breath. ‘It must have killed her to think of it all getting flushed down the pan because you couldn’t keep your trousers buttoned.’

  But Massi just shook his head dumbly. Sandro turned back to Antonella.

  ‘It’ll be on tape,’ he said calmly. ‘Even if the crazy old cat lady can’t be trusted to ID you, the waiter will, and you’ll be on film, they’re sending me stills from the camera, probably sitting on my computer right now, waiting for me. You kicked up a fuss in front of waiters, customers, pretending Claudio had touched her – why? Just to stop him talking? Just to get the girl away from him – she must have been scared when she saw it was you under that headscarf.’

  He took a breath; he mustn’t stop now; he had to follow this to its conclusion.

  ‘They must have thought you were crazy; no wonder they just tried to get away from you. And then, of course, you had to go after them; you had to finish it. You just lost it, didn’t you?’ He saw a tiny flush come to her sallow cheek; was this woman the type to lose control? You could never tell. He had to keep going.

  And then the last piece of the jigsaw fell into place, and he could nail her. The woman in the white coat, holding out her hand to Claudio Gentileschi.

  ‘And then you followed Claudio down to the river. How did you know where he’d be? Did you meet him there, sometimes, in his favourite bar, to talk business? So you knew where he’d go, you followed him down there and waited until he came out of the bar, the woman in the white coat that a witness. . .’ He had to pause again, breathless. ‘That a witness thought was a nurse. At one-thirty that afternoon, on the Lungarno Santa Rosa. You held out your hand for his keys, because you didn’t want all that beautiful work to go to waste, and you told him – something. Something that pushed him over the edge.’

  And Sandro folded his arms, felt a furious kind of pity almost choke him at the thought of poor Claudio, bewildered and bamboozled, two glasses of whisky on an empty stomach and a pretty girl. What did Scarpa say to him, in that state? She’d have thought of something
.

  And though Paolo Massi remained silent, an expression of idiot blankness on his face, Antonella Scarpa had found her tongue.

  ‘No!’ she said, flying at Sandro. ‘No, no, no, never, no.’ He held up a hand and gripped her wrist before it made contact. But the face she held up to his was not what he had expected. There was no hint of an admission, no hint of shame; had he underestimated her? He had not thought that she would lie.

  ‘Where did you put her?’ he persisted, though with Antonella Scarpa’s refusal to capitulate he felt an unexpected and terrible ebbing of his courage. His belief teetered; was this her? Beppe DiLieto’s camomile-drinking artistic Florentine? Arty – in her white painter’s coat. He couldn’t stop now, could he?

  ‘It’s what gets all murderers, in the end,’ he said. ‘The disposal of the body.’ And her face turned a shade paler in the yellow light at the words.

  He stood square on to her as she stood her ground in the doorway. ‘I want to see what’s out there,’ he said, nodding over her shoulder to the dull oxblood sheen of the door under the security light. ‘Open it.’ And she stood aside.

  Hiroko hung up. ‘It is him,’ she said. ‘Paolo Massi, that is Ronnie’s Paolo.’ She looked thoughtful. ‘He sounded very frightened, I think.’

  ‘Frightened?’ squeaked Sophia, ‘you mean -’

  ‘If he has her caller ID,’ Hiroko said, shrugging without finishing her sentence. ‘He thought I was Ronnie calling.’

  Jackson felt suddenly sick. ‘Iris was going over there,’ he said.

  ‘Over where?’ said Sophia.

  ‘To see Massi, she texted the detective guy to meet her there.’

  ‘At his house?’ Hiroko said.

  ‘I guess,’ said Jackson. ‘Yeah, the house. Jeez, d’you think she’d – well, I hope he’s there. The detective guy. I hope she’s not there on her own, it’s just like Iris to go in, y’know, head first. She’s really got it in for Massi.’

  ‘Do you blame her?’ said Hiroko.

  ‘Guess not,’ said Jackson. There was a silence. A television set on a bracket over the bar was showing the front of the Uffizi, and a fireman pumping out water, no more than a hundred yards from where they were sitting. Hiroko was looking down at her mobile with a thoughtful expression. The bar was still heaving and as hot as a sauna, Sophia was gazing at him with cloying hopefulness, and Jackson suddenly wanted to get out of there.

  ‘Her answerphone messages have come in,’ Hiroko said, pressing a button and holding the phone to her ear.

  ‘Yeah,’ said Jackson, thinking that he should have gone with her. ‘Yeah, you said. Guess it’ll be a whole bunch of people saying, Where the hell are you?’

  ‘Not this one,’ said Hiroko, holding up a hand to quiet him. She put the hand over her free ear to listen. ‘Received, Tuesday, 1 November, twelve twenty-eight p.m. This one is from Massi.’

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  The Apartment Was Even darker than she had remembered, though of course it had merely been a gloomy afternoon the last time she’d seen it, and now it was actually pitch dark outside. As she entered the cavernous salotto the ornaments and mobiles and dreamcatchers Iris remembered from her previous visit swayed and gleamed and tinkled like so many airborne mechanical insects.

  Anna Massi had sounded delighted to hear her through the crackle of the intercom, had let out a fluttering exclamation of pleasure. ‘Prego, prego,’ she’d said, not attempting English, and buzzed her through the door emphatically.

  It had not been until she’d been there ten minutes, set down on a sofa that trapped her like quicksand in its spongy depths, that Iris realized, to her despair, that Paolo Massi wasn’t at home. Anna Massi had filled the time with one polite question after another, offering her wine and cake and tea, and stroking her hand in her own cold one. For a second, agonizing at the waste of time getting out of here politely was going to involve, Iris imagined herself blurting the whole thing out to Anna Massi. It was stifling in the apartment; Iris couldn’t understand how the woman could have cold hands, and she didn’t enjoy the stroking.

  She shifted uncomfortably, and the sofa sucked her back down. Anna Massi was talking about her pilgrimages, Santiago di Compostela, Lourdes – ‘You know, I have witnessed so many miracles’ and ‘I walked a hundred kilometres to Santiago’ – holding out her slender hands as though in modesty, and Iris reflected in a distant corner of her brain that she could not be as delicate as she looked. Now she was asking Iris about Stonehenge, of all places, and its mystical significance. She moved on to the pyramids, and then it was extraterrestrials, all in the same monotone.

  ‘Excuse me,’ said Iris, interrupting her. ‘But when will your husband be back?’

  Anna Massi finished her sentence as though Iris hadn’t spoken, but there was a shift in her expression, a hint of displeasure. She smiled at Iris, but the smile didn’t reach her eyes.

  ‘Oh, heaven knows,’ she said, waving her hand vaguely. ‘He’s working with that Scarpa woman, always working. She makes him do too much. He’s at the school, or the gallery, I forget.’ Her fine head was tilted to one side, and she was smiling sadly. ‘He’s a martyr to his students, I do hope you appreciate him. Last week, he was in and out of there, just preparing for your little student show, so busy, I had to even help him myself.’

  She allowed herself a small smile. ‘He values my contribution. He needs me, you see. He is helpless without me. Sometimes I understand this.’

  Iris gazed at her, repelled.

  ‘This is a true marriage,’ she continued, gazing past Iris at the teeming window with a vague smile on her face. ‘It is a matter of sacrifice, compromise, working side by side, shared interest.’

  Something rose up in Iris as she thought of Ma, whom she hadn’t spoken to in a month, bent over her drawing board, trying to keep warm in her terrible house, trekking to Aix to tout her watercolours around the galleries. The thing that rose up in her was violence, a desire to thrash around this horrible spiderweb of a room and bring all the hanging, tinkling things down. A desire to bash a rock down on this woman’s head, or worse.

  And before she could stop herself she did say it. ‘Your husband was having an affair with my friend Ronnie,’ she said, very clearly and deliberately, in English. ‘Your saintly bloody husband, and now she’s dead. She’s dead.’

  Antonella Scarpa had relapsed now into a stony silence, although it turned out later she was only biding her time. She pushed the door open in front of him and Sandro took a step through it knowing that once beyond it he would be in a position they were always advised against in police college. No exit, never mind no mobile signal, hidden from the street. But that was why he was in here, wasn’t it? He was stepping into the pit laid for him, and he knew it.

  She’d been here. He knew it even before he saw the evidence, he could smell it in the air. Not her perfume or her sweat but something baser, earthier, more primal, like the smell of a beast in a trap. The dismal smell of abandonment he’d detected in the desolate playground on the Lungarno Santa Rosa, where Claudio had walked to his death believing he need not go on living.

  It looked ordinary enough. The space narrowed as it went back, barely room for him and Antonella Scarpa together. On his left a wall of shallow drawers for documents or plans – or drawings, as it turned out. Scarpa said nothing as he took one out, then another. ‘Claudio’s work?’ he said, but she remained silent. Exercising her right, even though he wasn’t a police officer any longer, no rights had been read. ‘We’ll soon find out, you know,’ he said.

  Slowly he turned; behind him on the wall opposite the drawers was a cupboard, an awkward wedge shape in the angle of the low vaulted roof; a key stuck out of the small lock. He turned the key, pulled gently at the door, dropped to his knees to peer into the confined space and that was when he smelled it. His more rational side told him it was probably the damp coming up from under the hill, but the side of him that believed in offering up a muttered prayer now and again kn
ew it was something else too. The cotto floor was scuffed with dusty footmarks, a scattering of tiny white stones and on the brickwork to one side of the door a single tawny hair was caught, dyed caramel blonde, dark at the root, long. Ronnie. He stood, face to face with Antonella Scarpa, and offered up the hair to her, on the palm of his hand.

  ‘No,’ she said, and her voice wobbled.

  They were standing up against the end of the space now, and another door, cold against his back. He could see past Antonella Scarpa back into the red womb-space of the gallery and Paolo Massi hovering uncertainly beside his ornate desk. ‘There’s no point in trying to run for it,’ he called down the narrow canyon of the corridor. ‘Where are you going to run?’

  Scarpa didn’t even bother to look back. ‘Let him run,’ she said in a low voice.

  ‘Not what you expected, huh?’ said Sandro.

  ‘I expected nothing,’ she said. ‘I work for him.’ She spat the words again ‘I. Work. When I am asked to move things, I move them, to take the students to a pottery demonstration, I take them, to organize life models, I organize. Work. I don’t love him, I don’t even like him.’

  ‘So it was work,’ said Sandro, and he felt some edifice he had built begin to topple. ‘It was Claudio telling her all about his forging techniques. You killed her for that.’ But his blank voice betrayed his doubt.

  ‘It was not me,’ said Antonella.

  He jerked his head fiercely in the direction of Paolo Massi. ‘He said it was her. You were seen.’

  ‘If anyone saw me anywhere near the girl,’ she said deliberately, unafraid now, ‘they were mistaken.’ She held up a thumb. ‘Number one. I never, ever wear my coat outside the gallery or the studio; like a uniform, I take it off, when I leave.’ She shrugged. ‘Maybe someone who likes to pretend they are a worker, who wishes to appear as though they have a job instead of hiding in their apartment or buying shoes, maybe that kind of person would wear a uniform on the street.’