The Dark Angel

by Elly Griffiths

  ‘I hope I can still fit into my swimming costume,’ says Michelle.

  She takes ages getting ready, during which time Laura starts to worry that the costume doesn’t fit, that her mother is feeling sick or has lost her nerve. But then Michelle appears in black tracksuit trousers and a pink top, her hair tied back in a ponytail.

  ‘I’m ready.’

  ‘Great.’ Laura has her bag ready by the door. She almost sprints to the car. Bruno starts to whine as soon as he sees the gym bags, and by the time they are backing out of the drive, he is working himself up to full banshee.

  ‘He’ll upset the neighbours,’ says Michelle.

  ‘He’ll go to sleep as soon as we’re out of sight,’ says Laura.

  The gym is full of the after-work crowd, but Laura finds herself a mat by the full-length windows. She can see the pool and her mother swimming up and down, doing a racing turn at each end. Both her parents are good swimmers; Dad used to be a lifeguard and Michelle did synchronised swimming. Laura remembers swimming in the freezing Blackpool sea with Dad, her hands and feet going numb. Mum had stayed on the beach on those occasions – she doesn’t like swimming in the open water. Laura watches her mother affectionately, almost protectively, and then focuses her attention on the weights.

  Afterwards, she feels brilliant. She has a shower and meets Mum in the lobby. Michelle looks happy too, her hair wet, finishing a KitKat.

  ‘I bought one for you too,’ she says.

  ‘You’re eating for two,’ says Laura, putting the chocolate bar in her bag. She’ll find a way of getting rid of it later.

  ‘I think that’s a myth,’ says Michelle.

  They stop at Waitrose for some healthy food and then drive home, the radio playing the kind of soppy songs Michelle likes. Laura even forgives her for singing along to Take That. She’s just relieved that her mother is happy again. And tomorrow Dad will be home. Back for good, as Gary Barlow would say.

  ‘Bruno has gone to sleep,’ says Michelle as they get out of the car.

  ‘I told you he was putting it on,’ says Laura, opening the boot to get out the shopping. She refuses to let her mother help with the bags, so Michelle opens the front door.

  ‘Bruno!’ she shouts. ‘We’re home.’

  But there’s no answering bark or clattering of toenails as Bruno comes hurtling along the hall. There’s only silence. Laura puts down the shopping and runs up the stairs. Sometimes Bruno sneaks in and sleeps on one of the beds. But every bed is neatly made, with duvet and matching counterpane – even Rebecca’s, because Michelle can’t stand to see unmade beds. There’s no sign of the dog anywhere. Laura hears her mother searching downstairs and the back door opening.

  Laura runs down and joins Michelle in the garden.

  ‘How can he have got out?’ she says.

  ‘The back door was open,’ says Michelle. ‘Wide open.’

  ‘It was locked,’ says Laura. ‘I checked.’

  ‘So did I,’ says Michelle.

  They look at each other as the silence grows around them.

  *

  Ruth only gets a few moments alone with Nelson. The children have said goodbye, Kate gripping Nelson with a bear hug that involves arms and legs, and Shona is supervising them getting into bed. Cathbad, in a moment of pure tact, leaves first because he ‘wants to see the fountain in the moonlight’. Ruth and Nelson are left on the landing. An in-between place, thinks Ruth, one of the liminal zones so beloved of her ex-tutor Erik. The wood between the worlds.

  ‘Bye then, Ruth,’ says Nelson.

  ‘Bye,’ says Ruth. ‘Safe journey.’

  He hesitates, and then he kisses her. A proper kiss, which takes her by surprise. For a moment, she kisses him back, and then she backs away. She raises her hand as if they are already several feet apart.

  ‘Goodbye,’ she says again. ‘See you soon.’

  She lets herself back into the flat. At least she didn’t cry, she tells herself.

  *

  Laura rings the RSPCA and the vet. ‘He’s microchipped,’ she says, ‘and he’s very home-loving, He wouldn’t go far.’ She hears her voice wobbling and says goodbye very quickly.

  Michelle is sitting on the sofa in her gym gear, twisting a strand of hair between her fingers. Rebecca does that too when she’s worried.

  ‘Harry will never forgive me if anything happens to his dog,’ says Michelle.

  ‘I’m sure he’s OK,’ says Laura. ‘He’s probably just wandered off somewhere.’ She longs for her father to come back. She’s sick of being the adult. She wants to lie on the sofa and cry. She wants to hear her Dad summoning forces from King’s Lynn CID to search for Bruno. She thinks of Judy and Clough (Uncle Dave to her and Rebecca) coming to the rescue with their professionalism and calm.

  ‘Shall we ring the station?’ she says. ‘Maybe Uncle Dave will be there.’

  ‘He’s on his honeymoon,’ says Michelle. Twist, twist, twist.

  ‘Judy, then.’

  ‘Let’s wait for a bit. Like you said, he’s probably just wandered off.’

  What about the open back door, thinks Laura. But she says nothing and they both sit on the sofa, their ears straining for the familiar bark.

  By nightfall they are starting to panic. Laura rings the RSPCA again and is told that no one has found a stray German Shepherd. Eventually, she does ring the King’s Lynn police, but it’s a desk sergeant she doesn’t know and, though he’s perfectly nice and sympathetic, she doesn’t quite have the nerve to ask to be passed to CID.

  She goes out in the car, leaving Michelle at home in case Bruno comes back. It’s dark now and the residential streets are quiet, but she stops at every alleyway or open patch of grass. ‘Bruno! Bruno!’ Once she hears a dog bark and her heart jumps, but it’s only an elderly Great Dane on a lead, coming back from his evening walk and letting the neighbourhood cats know of his presence. She drives past the allotments, the trees heavy with fruit. It must be nearly autumn, she thinks. How can they face a winter without Bruno? Last Christmas, she and Rebecca had bought him a stocking full of dog treats. They’ve only had Bruno a year, but already he’s one of the creatures she loves most on earth. In fact, she loves him second only to Mum, Dad and Rebecca (in joint first place). More than Chad? Definitely more than Chad. She’s crying now and she wipes away the tears with the back of her hand. She can’t afford to go to pieces. She has to stay strong for Mum.

  Back home she finds her mother in the garden, rattling a fork against Bruno’s dish. Normally this sound has him slavering at their side in seconds but now there is nothing, just the birds singing in the twilight. Michelle is shivering, so Laura makes her come back inside. She makes tea, thinking that this is a very British thing to do. Why do they think that pouring water on some dried leaves will make them feel better? It does though, momentarily.

  Neither of them feel like supper. They sit down and watch a programme about past X Factor winners. The new series is set to start on Saturday. Rebecca FaceTimes halfway through. She loves the show and likes to feel as if they’re watching as a family.

  ‘Don’t tell her about Bruno,’ Michelle whispers. ‘I don’t want her to worry.’ So Laura has to carry on a fake-cheerful conversation about boy bands versus girl bands and whether JLS should have beaten Alexandra Burke. Rebecca also wants to talk about the baby. ‘Maybe he’ll be a pop star.’

  ‘Mum’s into gender stereotyping,’ says Laura, ‘he’s only allowed to play football.’

  ‘That’s not true,’ says Michelle, twisting her hair.

  ‘We’ll make him a modern man,’ says Rebecca, as if she is offering to knit him one for Christmas, ‘he’ll be the perfect boyfriend by the time we’ve finished with him.’

  Chad is the perfect boyfriend, thinks Laura, when the programme and the FaceTime chat have both finished. How come she doesn’t feel even tempted to ring him?

  ‘What do you want to watch now?’ she says to Michelle.

  ‘I don’t know,’ says her mother. ‘S
hall we ring the RSPCA again?’

  *

  ‘Let’s have an early night,’ says Shona, and Ruth readily agrees. But, alone in her bedroom, she finds that she can’t sleep. Determinedly, she turns off the light and closes her eyes, but words and images keep floating behind her eyelids, as though she is watching a TV channel that can’t be switched off. She sees herself kissing Nelson on the landing; Don Tomaso’s body being carried into the church; a skeletal hand with a missing finger; a cat walking across an empty square.

  Why all this talk of the dead?

  There must be so many resentments simmering under the surface.

  Being a hero doesn’t make you popular. Not in Italy anyway.

  They believed that it would prevent the bodies returning to haunt the earth.

  He was a holy man. A saint.

  Towns like this keep their own secrets.

  It’s no good. Ruth gets up and walks into the sitting room. There are no curtains at the balcony window and she can see the valley below, silver and black in the moonlight. She thinks of the picture painted by Giorgio. What had Pompeo thought when he looked at it? It seems strange that, having treasured it all these years, it should have been relegated to what is obviously a spare bedroom.

  Ruth goes to the door of the children’s room. They are both sleeping peacefully. There’s no sound from Shona either, no telltale buzz of a telephone conversation. In fact, the apartment is completely silent; there’s no ticking clock, no comforting creaking of the furniture. The modern tables and chairs give nothing away and the marble floors are as silent as tombstones. A light shines suddenly from a small table. It’s a phone – Nelson’s phone. Ruth recognises it immediately because he doesn’t have a case and the phone always looks battered, the screen slightly cracked. Nelson must have put it down when Kate hugged him and forgotten to pick it up. Maybe he’d been more upset at saying goodbye than she had realised. Ruth picks up the phone. It’s password protected, but she sees there is a missed call from Michelle. Probably just more heart-warming baby news. Ruth is quite glad that she doesn’t know the password. She’ll text Cathbad and tell him that the phone is here. Nelson can pick it up on his way to the airport tomorrow morning.

  She pads into the kitchen. She will make herself a cup of tea and take it back to her room. Then she’ll text Cathbad. It’s only when she switches on the electric kettle that she realises that there must have been another power cut. She tries the light switch. Nothing. She considers getting her phone and using the torch app to look in the cupboard, but she remembers Angelo saying that the electricity often goes off unexpectedly in the mountain villages. She’ll just have a cup of tea and wait. Now where did Shona put that old kettle, the one they used on the night of the earthquake? She spots it up on the top shelf, and climbs on a chair to retrieve it. As she climbs down, she hears something rattling inside the old kettle. Perhaps its innards are coming loose? She prises off the lid and looks inside.

  There’s something there. Something small and metallic. Shona can’t have noticed it when she used the kettle before – understandable in the circumstances. Ruth picks up the object between finger and thumb and puts it on the kitchen table.

  Moonlight is shining in through the high, barred window. Ruth sees immediately that she is looking at an animal tooth, mounted with silver on one end as though intended to be worn on a chain. She hears Angelo’s voice: He kept the boar’s tooth as a souvenir, wore it round his neck. My grandfather always used to tell that story. This must be the talisman that Giorgio took from the animal that tried to kill him – rather as prehistoric people painted the animals they hunted, hoping that this would give them power over their prey. Ruth picks it up; the tooth is sharp and cold. It feels odd, holding such a totemic object in her hand. Why had Pompeo kept it and why had it been hidden away in an old kettle?.

  ‘Ah, you find it,’ says a conversational voice.

  It’s Elsa, standing in the doorway. She’s as beautifully dressed as ever and she is smiling warmly. It takes Ruth a few minutes to register the fact that Elsa has appeared in their flat in the middle of the night. And the fact that she’s holding a gun.

  *

  Laura and Michelle both jump at the knock on the door.

  ‘They’ve found him!’ says Michelle.

  ‘Thank God.’ Laura leaps up and almost runs to the door. Poor Bruno, he must be tired and hungry by now. He’ll be so pleased to see them, the sweet puppy. She opens the door, smiling, arms outstretched.

  There’s a man there. A smallish man wearing glasses. He doesn’t have Bruno with him, nor does he look particularly threatening.

  Except for the gun in his hand.

  Chapter 31

  ‘What are you doing here?’ says Ruth. Her voice is shaking. Why oh why did she leave her phone in her room? Why doesn’t Shona wake up? The children are sleeping only a few metres away and Ruth is trapped in the kitchen facing a woman with a lethal weapon.

  ‘I have key,’ says Elsa, as if this explains everything. The gun is a heavy, old-fashioned thing. Ruth thinks that it might be a hunting rifle. It can’t possibly be loaded, can it? Elsa gestures with it now, the muzzle pointing at the boar’s tooth, still in Ruth’s hand.

  ‘That was Giorgio’s. I knew it must be here. Where did you find it?’

  ‘In the old kettle,’ says Ruth.

  Elsa laughs. The sound is almost like her usual laugh, but the note is slightly wrong. ‘The kettle. Trust the Englishwoman to look in the kettle.’

  ‘But . . .’ Ruth is trying to figure out what on earth is going on, though she can hardly focus on anything except the gun in Elsa’s hand. ‘Why is it here?’

  ‘Papa killed Giorgio,’ says Elsa. ‘I did not know at the time, but Papa told me, in his last days. Giorgio was traitor, passing secrets to the Nazis. It broke Papa’s heart but he had to kill him.’

  Ruth slowly places the tooth on the table, where it glints in the moonlight. Why did Pompeo keep it? As a reminder of the friend he had killed? Is that why he also kept Giorgio’s painting on the wall? Why Elsa kept his photograph in her house?

  ‘I didn’t know where he buried him,’ says Elsa, ‘but I suspected the old graveyard. That’s why I asked Angelo to stop excavation there.’

  ‘Why?’ says Ruth. ‘No one would know, after all these years.’

  ‘Someone did know,’ says Elsa.

  ‘Don Tomaso,’ says Ruth.

  ‘Sì. Don Tomaso. He knew. I think Papa confess to him.’

  And suddenly Ruth remembers what had bothered her when Marta was talking about the priest’s funeral. We all want the funeral here, in Don Tomaso’s church, but apparently the bishop wants it at the cathedral. It was the echo of her conversation with Angelo, that first night, sitting in the square. Angelo had been talking about his hero grandfather. He had a state funeral, at the church in Cassino. Why was Pompeo’s funeral in Cassino and not at San Michele e Santi Angeli, the church in the town where he had lived all his life? Was it because the parish priest knew that he was a murderer?

  ‘But Don Tomaso wouldn’t say,’ says Ruth. ‘He was a priest.’ Can she overpower Elsa, who is seventy-nine, after all? But the gun might be loaded. It could go off and kill or injure Ruth, and then Elsa would be free to go on a killing spree in the flat. She tries to send a thought message to Shona: Wake up. Call the police.

  ‘People get careless when they get old,’ says Elsa. ‘After Giorgio’s body was found, I could take no risks. Already Marta was suspicious.’

  She certainly was, thinks Ruth. Her mother, too. Was that why Anna had been in the flat on the day of the funeral? To look for the boar’s tooth as proof of . . . what? Proof that her grandfather had been murdered? Ruth had thought that it might have been Marta or Roberto, both of whom drive little Fiats, who had forced them off the road that night, but it could easily have been Elsa. Didn’t she tell Ruth that she drove a small car?

  ‘What does it matter?’ says Ruth, trying to sound soothing. ‘It was all so long
ago.’

  ‘How can you say that?’ says Elsa. ‘And you an archaeologist! It matters because I want people to remember Papa as hero.’

  ‘He was a hero,’ says Ruth, thinking that heroism very much depends which side you are on. Was it heroic to bomb the monastery at Monte Cassino? Maybe some people think so.

  ‘Yes,’ says Elsa, ‘and soon anyone who says otherwise will be dead.’

  She levels the gun at Ruth.

  *

  Judy is driving home when she gets the message from control. ‘Missing dog,’ says the operator.

  ‘What’s that got to do with me?’ says Judy. She wants to get home in time to see Michael before he goes to sleep. Miranda will already be in bed. ‘She’s ever so good with me,’ her mother said smugly yesterday. ‘I just read her a story and she closes her little eyes. “Goodnight,” I say. “Don’t let the bedbugs bite.” “Goodnight, Nanny,” she says.’

  She closes her little eyes with me too, thinks Judy, but then she opens them again and demands another story. But Michael will be waiting for her, she knows. He always tries to stay awake to say goodnight to her.

  ‘Nothing,’ says the operator, sounding rather offended. ‘It’s just that it’s DCI Nelson’s dog.’

  ‘Bruno? Are you sure?’

  ‘Yes. I double-checked the address. His daughter rang it in. She sounded very upset.’

  ‘Thanks for telling me,’ says Judy.

  She pulls in at the side of the road. It’s only a dog, she tells herself, dogs go missing all the time. Thing is always burrowing under their fence to try to scrounge food from the old lady next door. But Nelson is away and she knows that both his daughters adore the dog. And Michelle is pregnant and might be stressed. Besides, there had been something odd about Michelle when Judy had called in on her the other day. She’d seemed on edge, almost as if she were scared.