A Florentine Revenge

by Christobel Kent

  What Celia couldn’t articulate to Kate was what the conversation had revealed to her about Dan. Could she even understand it fully herself? She had known none of this before, he had never mentioned it in their three years together and nor had anyone else. He had hidden it away, and when he had begun, haltingly, to explain to Celia how he had come to know Lucas Marsh so well that he could recognize him in the street fifteen years later his face had been white, his voice low as though he was making a confession.

  ‘I thought – I had some idea of turning myself into a journalist,’ he’d said, and he shook his head. ‘Not an ordinary journalist. I thought I could bring poetry into it, get to the heart of things, crack things open. Reveal truths, about grief, or violence, or something.’ His voice was rich with self-disgust. ‘God knows what I thought.’ He paused, and in a moment of revelation Celia had understood that this was where the chip of ice in Dan’s heart had come from, somehow.

  ‘I – there’s not necessarily anything wrong with that. Not with the impulse, anyway. Is there?’ she asked. He’d stared at her then, looking for redemption for 2. split second and then turning away, refusing it.

  ‘Maybe not,’ he said, but there was no sense that he drew comfort from her words. ‘But there was certainly something wrong with the execution.’ He looked at her directly. ‘I hung around the police station. I went :o the swimming pool and tracked down the people who’d been lying on the next sun-loungers, I spoke to the man who worked the bar, the skinny girl who handed out the keys to the lockers, I even remember her name. Giulietta Sarto. I knew they were after Bartolo, so I sucked up to his mother and even got her to give me a cup of coffee in her kitchen while I listened to her going on about what a good son he was.’ He stopped then, as though something was in his way, something he couldn’t get around. When he spoke again his voice was so low she had hardly been able to hear.

  ‘I found out where they were staying, the bereaved parents.’ He shook his head. ‘His wife was very ill with it, you could see. Even I could see, and I should have stopped then, but I was so full of myself for having found them. I was twenty-five.’ Dan looked as though he wanted to cry, but he couldn’t.

  ‘He wasn’t much older than me, thirty perhaps, but he looked like an old man when he came to the door of this place, some kind of police house. And I said, How are you feeling?’ He put his face in his hands for a moment, then went on. ‘I doorstepped him. And then he looked at me, and he said, How am I feeling? How am I feeling? And he took a step towards me, just one step, and he had a look of such complete desperation, as though he didn’t know if he wanted to kill me or kill himself.’ He laid his hands down on the table between them, then, and looked up at her. ‘I left. I never saw him again, until today. But he’s just the same.’

  Celia had wanted to cover Dan’s hands with hers but she couldn’t; she’d thought of Lucas Marsh’s white face and she felt sick. She just looked at his hands on the table, then up at Dan, and she saw that he was getting old – there was a web of lines under his eyes that hadn’t been there before, when she’d left him, or he’d left her. It didn’t seem to matter much any more.

  She realized she’d been gripping the telephone so tight her hand was half-numb; she couldn’t remember what she’d been saying to Kate, only the meaningless phrase, It was terrible, rang in her ears. Then Kate spoke.

  ‘Well,’ she said, ‘I suppose I can see that. A child dying…’ She fell silent again and Celia knew what she was thinking. ‘We’re all afraid of it, you know,’ Kate said abruptly. ‘We all lie awake thinking about losing a child. That’s why—’ She broke off.

  ‘That’s why what?’ There was something in Kate’s voice, a wobbliness that Celia didn’t recognize.

  ‘I’m having another baby,’ said Kate then, quickly. ‘I know what you’ll think, hasn’t she got enough? What an idiot giving herself more work, what’ll happen about the job…?’ She started out defiant, but then her voice caught and broke.

  ‘Hey, wait a minute,’ said Celia, astounded. ‘What are you talking about?’ She’d never heard Kate like this. On the other end of the line Kate burst into tears. ‘But you – you do want the baby?’ said Celia.

  ‘Yes!’ Kate sounded furious and hopeless at the same time. ‘Yes, at least I think – yes.’ She took a breath, then spoke hurriedly, as though confiding something she didn’t want overheard. ‘You don’t know what it’s like. At the back of your mind there’s always the thought, what if I lose one? Slip one more in and I’ll be safe.’ There was a pause and then she laughed raggedly.

  ‘Oh,’ said Celia, and she didn’t know what to say. A Kate she had never known materialized in front of her, anxious, insecure, appealing to her for help. It was an entirely unfamiliar sensation. ‘Oh.’ She thought a moment, dwelt for longer than she had ever dared on the thought of having a child of her own and what its loss might mean. ‘I think I’d be just the same,’ she ventured truthfully. ‘I mean, how could I know, but it doesn’t even sound that irrational to me. And – well. A baby!’ She remembered her excitement when Imogen had been bom. She even remembered regaling Dan (had she really? she couldn’t help grimacing at the memory) with details from the delivery, nine and a half pounds, blue eyes.

  Down the line Kate cleared her throat and sighed, and in the background Celia could hear Imogen’s insistent, high-pitched voice, close to the receiver. ‘Mummy, what’s for pudding?’ There was a muffled, weary exchange, and Celia imagined the two of them at the kitchen table in the yellow light shed by Kate’s carefully chosen and saved-for French porcelain shades. When Kate spoke she sounded like herself again, perhaps even a little sharper.

  ‘So, this Lucas Marsh flew in the day after the man they think killed his daughter is murdered? Sounds like a bit of a coincidence to me,’ Kate mused.

  ‘He called me a bit more than three weeks ago,’ said Celia slowly, trying to make sense of it. ‘His trip had been planned for longer, but he called me when he knew he was bringing his wife.’ Lucas was coming to get him, to see the man who’d killed his daughter.

  ‘It says something about a DNA test in the piece I read,’ said Kate, pondering. ‘Maybe—’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Celia quickly, and together they fell silent, imagining Lucas Marsh meticulously making arrangements to return to the city where his daughter had been murdered. Like some kind of terrible ceremonial of remembrance, awaiting confirmation of his child’s killer. Would he have come to look into the man’s face, to ask him what he had done, why he had done it? So why was Bartolo dead before he arrived? Celia speculated wildly that he might have come earlier, in secret, to kill Bartolo with his own hands, but she knew that was impossible. He’d flown in with Emma. And then she remembered the drawing Beate had made of Lucas; she remembered the man he’d stood there talking to at the river’s edge with his raw, big-knuckled hands, and her stomach contracted, wondering.

  ‘Well, he’s dead, anyway,’ said Kate, deliberately brutal. ‘I’d have killed him.’

  ‘What if it wasn’t him, though?’ said Celia, still trying to make sense of what she’d seen.

  ‘Well,’ said Kate, ‘no smoke without fire, if you ask me. It sounds like he was a creep. They use words like loner and misfit in the newspapers, but we all know what they mean.’

  Kate’s voice was bitter and Celia thought, this is the kind of thing you can’t get out of your mind, once you have children. She thought of Kate doggedly going through the article, avid for information, and Celia had hardly been able to finish it, it had sickened her. There was a silence. ‘Well,’ said Kate after a bit, conciliatory. ‘He’s dead, so maybe it’s all over.’

  ‘Maybe,’ said Celia, wondering what on earth this evening’s dinner would be like. She didn’t think it was all over, not at all.

  ‘So,’ said Kate. ‘You’re seeing Dan again.’ And despite herself, Celia laughed.

  21

  Luisa heard the phone ringing as she was unlocking the door and she fumbled with th
e key, groped her way down the dark corridor towards the sound. It rang loud and unfamiliar in the empty flat, a shrill, antiquated ring; Sandro had his mobile, she had one too somewhere although she couldn’t get on with it, but since her mother died, no one really used the land line much. In Luisa’s present state, at once tense and exhausted, her stomach sour with apprehension after leaving Lucas and Emma Marsh with their secret to unravel in the stifling luxury of a hotel room, the sound was ominous. She dropped the bag containing the dress Emma Marsh had bought for Celia Donnelly at her feet and picked up the receiver, standing stiffly as she spoke into it.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Can you put Sandro on?’ It was Pietro, and his voice was terse.

  ‘What?’ In the dark Luisa swayed, feeling giddy, and she reached out a hand to steady herself. She groped for the switch on the lamp by the phone. ‘He’s not here, Pietro.’ She made a conscious effort not to betray the panic she felt like a rising tide in her throat, forced unconcern into her trembling voice. Pietro grunted, and she had the impression he was deciding whether to believe her or not. She looked around the little sitting room quickly for any sign that Sandro had been back, and saw none. The round mahogany table gleamed quietly, the sofa cushions were neat and plump, all undisturbed.

  ‘I spoke to him a couple of hours ago,’ she said calmly. ‘He was with you, he said, out near the aiport?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Pietro. ‘We were there.’ He spoke cautiously. ‘Then we’d just got back to the station and before we even got inside Sandro suddenly said he was due a break, and he was off before I could ask him what the hell he was up to. I let him go because – well…’ He sounded almost embarrassed, hesitating. ‘If you want the truth I thought you and him – well, I thought you were going through a bad patch, thought you needed to talk’ He paused. ‘I mean, he’s been on the phone to you every five minutes, you’ve got to admit it looks funny.’

  The flat suddenly felt suffocating, the ancient iron radiators silently, steadily blasting out heat. Sweat sticky on her back, Luisa thought about the irony of what Pietro had said. The bad patch had lasted fifteen years, and Pietro, a detective for most of that, had only just noticed. Never mind the irony that this was the closest they’d come in all that time, that those phone calls that had looked so suspicious to Pietro felt like a lifeline to Luisa.

  ‘Well, I haven’t seen him,’ she said, passing no comment on the state of her marriage to Pietro. ‘But I’ve been at work, haven’t I?’

  ‘Yes, well,’ said Pietro, and she could hear just a hint of panic in his voice, ‘it’s more serious than that. Than whatever’s happening between you and him.’

  ‘Nothing’s happening between me and him,’ said Luisa distractedly, trying to get at what Pietro was saying. ‘What are you talking about, Pietro?’

  ‘I don’t know if I can—’ Pietro broke off, and then when he spoke again she could hear his breath as though he had his mouth up against the receiver. ‘It’s confidential. It’s police business.’

  Luisa waited, said nothing of what she knew. She didn’t want to get Sandro into more trouble. She held on, waiting, then heard Pietro exhale. ‘Look,’ he said, ‘you didn’t get this from me, all right? But I’ve known Sandro twenty years, it’s madness.’ He hesitated only briefly. ‘The thing is, after he walked off like that, I went into the station and all hell broke loose. Everyone wanted Sandro, they all started shouting at me at once. He’d been called into a meeting with the chief; that conniving little bastard Gemelli on paperwork found something in the photocopier and kept it. A letter to the father of the dead girl, signed by Sandro. There’s a box at the post office, too. I suppose Gemelli thought he was showing he had the makings of a detective, tracking that down.’ Pietro snorted. ‘A detective!’ There was a silence, then a heavy sigh.

  ‘They’d been trying to get hold of him all afternoon; he’d turned off the police radio, and his mobile, and I never noticed.’ His voice was leaden. ‘There’s going to be an official inquiry, anyway,’ he said, then stopped. ‘A bloody lynch mob – maybe I’d be running too if I had that lot after me.’

  Luisa quailed. ‘Do you think he’s running?’ She felt dizzy at the thought; where would he go? His parents were long dead. She and Pietro were all he had. She thought of all the shadowy characters he had had dealings with over twenty years as a policeman: informants, conmen, pickpockets, drug dealers. For a moment, thinking of how alone he must be, a worse thought occurred to Luisa than that Sandro might have left her, worse than the thought that he might have vanished for some foreign border. ‘You don’t think – he wouldn’t—’

  ‘No,’ said Pietro quickly, a warning note in his voice, but then he stopped. ‘Jesus, who knows? I don’t think so, but I’m beginning to wonder. Did you know about any of this, Luisa? Because I didn’t. Twenty years together, and I had no idea.’

  The thought that she shared her ignorance with Pietro gave Luisa an odd kind of comfort, but – poor Sandro. The day he must have had. She tried to forget the horrible possibility that had been raised between them, that Sandro might feel he was at the end of the line. He’d never leave me. It came to her that if she didn’t believe that, it was all over anyway. With a great effort she spoke calmly again. ‘Not before yesterday, Pietro. He told me nothing before then, honestly. And he really isn’t here, no sign of him at all. What are we going to do?’

  The moment she put the phone down, of course, she dialled Sandro’s number, but there was no reply; she heard the answering service and automatically hung up; she couldn’t talk to those things. But what else could she do? She thought for a moment, called the number again, and blurted out the first thing that came into her head.

  ‘Sandro,’ she said urgently, hopelessly. ‘Sandro, it’s me.’ How much time did she have, to say all that she needed to say? ‘Call me. Call home.’

  It was only after she’d put the phone down for the third time that she found it, a folded scrap of paper, sodden and dirty, left carelessly on the kitchen table for anyone to see. As she unfolded it she had the strongest feeling of having seen it before, dates, times, places, neatly word-processed by a diligent Florence City Guide whose blurred photograph was reproduced in the corner of the page. Wordlessly, she reached into her handbag and pulled out the page Lucas Marsh had given her with Celia Donnelly’s address on it; they were the same.

  Luisa sat at the kitchen table and stared at the page, tried to make sense of the illusion it offered. A romantic weekend to be spent wandering through chapels and gardens, idling hand in hand in the sunlit corridors of the Uffizi, no expense spared. She looked down to the last line on the page, circled in red. Dinner at the Palazzo Ferrigno, drinks at seven-thirty. She stood and paced the room, from the sink to the stove to the window, gazing at the props of her married life, the pots and pans and cupboards she had kept clean for twenty years, as though they might tell her something. Where has he gone? She dialled Pietro, but when he answered his voice sounded odd, wooden.

  ‘I can’t talk right now,’ he said, and when he didn’t say her name she understood he must be with someone, someone he was protecting Sandro from. In frustration she hung up.

  Walking from the kitchen into the dark corridor, she stared down it, willing the front door to open and let Sandro in. She went into the bedroom and opened the wardrobe; there hung her husband’s ironed trousers, his sports jackets, his sweaters. Something was missing though; she looked, waiting for it to reveal itself. His warm coat, black padded nylon, that should have hung in the corner. It was gone. She looked down: his snowboots were gone too. In a panic she checked the suitcase, the holdalls, the drawers, but everything else was there. He’d been here, but he hadn’t packed to leave. If he was going to – if – surely he wouldn’t need to keep warm if he was going to…?

  No, no, no. She willed herself not to think about that; she made herself think of Sandro dressing warmly for the weather, prepared, not panicking. Had he taken the car? They had a small Fiat they kept on the street,
hardly ever used because the days were long gone when they might have gone out on a drive into the country on a summer evening, a Sunday. She couldn’t remember seeing it on her way home, but then she wouldn’t have looked; would they have the licence plate on record at the station? Of course they would, they’d find him. She went back into the sitting room.

  The first thing Luisa saw was the bag. There it sat, incongruously jaunty and hopeful, with Celia Donnelly’s dress in it. As she stood there and stared at it with not the faintest idea of what to do, another wave of heat rolled over from the great radiators; on the polished table the telephone sat silent. She stared from the bag to the crumpled piece of paper and to the bag again, and suddenly Luisa knew that if she stayed here and waited in passive ignorance, helpless, she would go mad. She took a small backpack and put the mobile she’d never used into it, a torch, a packet of biscuits, a thin blanket she used in the shop when it grew cold. She changed into trousers and put on thermal socks and snow boots, then, padded and stifled in the heat, awkwardly fitted her arms through the backpack’s straps and picked up the Frollini carrier bag.

  As Luisa stood, padded like a polar explorer, and contemplated her front door, she remembered something; she went back into the sitting room and slowly picked up the handbag she’d brought home from work. She reached into it and brought them out, three little sacks like sandbags: the day’s takings she’d never managed to bank. One of them was heavy with coins and she set it aside; from the other two she withdrew three, four, five fat rolls of notes and stowed them in the small backpack. What had she thought as she came out through the bank’s security doors, I could run away? The time for running away was past.