‘I know,’ she said, ‘I don’t understand the rights and wrongs of it myself, Clelia.’
Far off through the bowels of the building she heard the mechanical squeal that indicated someone had come in at the front door.
Ignoring the sound, Giuli went on. ‘I know there has to be trust in the system, or it fails. I don’t want to breach the trust – I work here too, after all – but Flavia’s disappeared. She left the baby behind and disappeared, and we need to find her.’
The fair, kindly, unadorned face gazed back at her, with dawning horror.
‘There’s something, isn’t there?’ said Giuli. ‘She wasn’t well, was she?’
As if mesmerized, Clelia Schmidt moved her head, indicating no, as though if she didn’t actually say the words, she could not be held responsible. Giuli slid from the high narrow couch and stood stiffly close to Clelia Schmidt, hands behind her back. ‘It’s a difficult time for mothers, everyone knows that. But was there anything in particular in Flavia’s case? There was, wasn’t there? Something more dangerous than the hormones and all that?’ The midwife’s distress deepened visibly.
‘I don’t know why you are saying these things,’ she said, shaking her head furiously. ‘The hormones are dangerous enough.’
‘So she was finding it hard?’ Giuli tried to keep the sense of urgency she felt out of her voice, heard herself sounding earnest.
Clelia Schmidt’s hands fiddled with nothing in her lap. ‘I was not her only caregiver,’ she said, and looked towards the cloister, out of the window, as if someone there might rescue her.
‘But you formed a relationship with her? As midwives do.’ Giuli knew this: it was part of their charter, to support women in childbirth and afterwards, the continuity of care, or something. The midwife bobbed her head reluctantly. ‘The hormones,’ prompted Giuli. ‘I mean, generally, can you tell me? The effect on them of giving birth.’
With half an ear she was listening out, now, for old Maria shuffling down the corridor to fetch her, but so far nothing. She leaned forward, attentive.
‘If we are speaking generally.’ The midwife seemed to relax, frowning, unfocused, at her computer screen. ‘There are certain conditions that can be brought on by the trauma of birth, by unregulated hormones and chemicals in the body, and by the emotional upheaval of birth.’ She was warming to her subject now, almost eager. ‘In some women – abused women, and we do see them here – the physical act of giving birth can—’ And she stopped short, staring at Giuli and stuttering, ‘Not that – not that I’m saying Flavia was – no, no—’
Damn, thought Giuli, composing her expression. ‘Of course not,’ she said, calmly. ‘You’re talking generally.’ Clelia Schmidt looked desperate. ‘Really. Please go on.’
‘The conditions that may be brought on by the birth are first, and most commonly, post-natal depression.’ She spoke as though reciting from a textbook. ‘This can be hard to detect. New mothers are aware that they are supposed to be happy and they feel ashamed when they are not, so they pretend. There are specific questions we can ask, but they are not always useful. Intelligent women in particular—’ And the midwife stopped again.
The one thing everyone knew about Flavia Matteo was that she was an intelligent woman. A degree in one thing, a master’s in another, a doctorate in something else. What other kind of woman would Niccolò Rosselli have wanted? But Giuli smiled blandly as if she hadn’t made the connection and Clelia went on doggedly.
‘Then there is post-partum psychosis,’ she said, raising her eyes to meet Giuli’s. ‘Much rarer, more – well, I don’t know if it is more serious. Post-natal depression can have very serious consequences. But more extreme. Mood swings, delusions, violence …’
‘Violence,’ said Giuli. Holding her gaze, Clelia nodded. ‘Towards – others?’
‘Often in psychosis,’ the midwife replied steadily. ‘In the deluded state the violence is employed against others.’
‘Such as?’
‘Such as the child,’ said the midwife, holding her gaze. ‘Most often, the child.’
Giuli said nothing.
‘Flavia left her child behind, you said.’
So we’re not really talking generally any more, thought Giuli, are we?
‘She did,’ was all she answered. But Flavia might have left the child behind to prevent herself from harming it.
‘I’m sure she wasn’t psychotic,’ blurted Clelia Schmidt, as though she’d read Giuli’s thoughts. Then she would say that, wouldn’t she? She wouldn’t want to admit she hadn’t detected it – but midwives weren’t psychiatrists. Detecting mania seemed to Giuli to be quite a responsibility.
‘What about depression?’ she said gently. ‘I mean, the behaviour pattern, speaking generally. Those serious consequences you were talking about.’
Clelia looked at her, her expression taut and anxious. ‘Any kind of depression can lead to family breakdown,’ she said. ‘Insomnia, inability to communicate, hopelessness, apathy, anxiety, panic attacks. And the failure to bond,’ her frown deepened, ‘can be very serious for the child and the mother, can lead to lasting psychological problems for both. And of course where in psychosis the violence may be directed outwards …’ Here she stopped.
Depressives killed themselves.
And Giuli heard her name, called down the corridors from the outside world. ‘Sarto?’ Maria’s croak. ‘Signorina Sarto?’ A man’s voice further off, hectoring. Sounded like a wife-batterer, come for his woman: it wasn’t uncommon.
‘Look,’ she said gently to Clelia Schmidt, ‘you’ve been a great help. I know how things are. But if you could talk to your colleagues. If there’s anything more—’
‘She might have been depressive, yes,’ the midwife said urgently, head bowed over her desk so she need not meet Giuli’s eye. ‘I watched her closely. She was anxious, yes. She was trying so hard – I didn’t want to demoralize her. I should have – should have done more.’
‘You’re doing plenty,’ said Giuli, her hand on the doorknob. ‘We still don’t know for sure.’
There was a rap. ‘Signorina Sarto?’ Maria must have heard her voice through the door.
‘Coming,’ called Giuli. And as she turned back she saw Clelia Schmidt’s eyes fixed on her, as if she represented hope. Don’t, she said in her head. Don’t look at me like that.
Chapter Eight
VESNA, WHO NEVER CRIED, found that she wanted to cry. Standing beside her outside the hotel, among the magnolia and laurels, Calzaghe had his greasy hand on her shoulder, not so much to comfort as to detain her; she knew that he was thinking about the effect this would have on business and how he could thrust Vesna ahead of him into the scandal of it. She pulled away.
Calzaghe turned at a sound, lifting his big head like a jowly dog scenting the air. It was the ambulance siren at last, coming closer but not quickly, not hurrying. It was, after all, too late for that. In a part of her brain Vesna knew that she should change. Her maid’s uniform was soaked, even her hair was dripping wet; she shivered suddenly. Was this shock? She felt numb, she wanted to cry but she could not. She remembered the dripping deadweight in her arms, slipping through them, impossibly heavy.
With her hand on the door, even before it opened, Vesna had known. The cool, moist air, the sudden sensation of emptiness like a kind of dying exhalation. The shushing draft from the open window, the neatly made bed; and the drip of a tap in the bathroom, splashing into a full tub. Vesna had set down the plastic basket in which she carried her spray detergent and her glasscloths and her duster on the floor by the door: it was still there to trip her up when – was it five, ten minutes later? – she ran – ran – dripping into the hall to shout. ‘Ambulance. Call an ambulance.’ And Calzaghe’s fat ugly face, rough with white stubble, scowling at her furiously up the stairwell.
She hadn’t looked for a note. Everything had seemed so orderly, so composed. The woman in number five had made the bed and packed her small bag. Or perhaps she had never s
lept? Perhaps she had never unpacked? She had looked out on to the distant sliver of sea from her balcony, she had at least done that, opened the windows and walked out into the air, looked at the world. Oh, God, thought Vesna as another shiver overtook her. On the gravel of the drive Calzaghe took a step away from her, as if shock might be contagious.
Must I go back up there? thought the maid with horror. To look for the note or the – the weapon, or the passport, to examine the bed to see if she’d slept there?
‘We don’t even know who she was,’ she murmured, and Calzaghe turned to her.
‘What?’ He spoke sharply.
‘I – well, she gave a name, in the register.’ Vesna couldn’t remember if she’d even looked at it, her mind a blank. ‘But I hadn’t got around to taking her ID,’ she mumbled, knowing she might as well take the blame now, it would come her way sooner or later. He glared at her and she took some satisfaction from the fact that the police would hold him responsible, ultimately. His hotel: she was just the Eastern European help. Calzaghe didn’t even know which country she came from, but she was legal.
The police. And they’d want to know when the woman died, wouldn’t they? When she’d done it. And Vesna wouldn’t be able to tell them. How long the thing had been there, and they going about their small business, the breakfasts and the laundry and the drying out of guest soaps.
She had walked towards the bathroom quickly, crossing the large bedroom, looking around, slowing unconsciously as she approached the door of the en suite. One of the earliest en-suite bathrooms, Art Deco, was how she’d been told to introduce it to guests who might be more familiar with shiny modern chrome and glass. ‘No shower?’ some of them would say incredulously, looking around at the original fittings, the cream rectangular tiles with black border, then down at the vast, yellowing marble tub.
The tub was in fact so big that she had fitted inside it, full length, like a child’s drawing of a woman. A woman underwater. A woman whose legs were too thin, though her stomach was softish, very pale skin with a dark line running up it. Vesna knew what that was: the linea nigra. The toes turned in, the dark red hair floating out around her head in water stained pink, the hands palm up and the wounds across the wrists frilled and blanched from immersion. The woman in number five, lying dead in the bath, was wearing her underwear.
Taking it all in – the sink, the toothbrush, the chemist’s paper folded, the open packet, the white palm of the woman’s hand marked like a schoolchild’s – Vesna wondered if she would ever be able to erase it now, like the pink stain to the tub. How would you go about cleaning blood from marble? And then with that thought in her head she had dashed for the bath, plunged her arms in and grappled for the body – the woman – felt her bob and slip under her hands, grabbed and pulled and hauled until the woman’s weight shifted abruptly, up and flopping across the bath’s edge and on top of Vesna. She still felt the spongy flesh between her fingers.
‘I’m going to be sick,’ she said to Calzaghe, turned aside and vomited into the laurels, just as the ambulance pulled up at the rusting gate.
‘For the love of God,’ he said with disgust. ‘Jesus.’
And, head down between her knees, the sour smell of her own stomach contents in her nostrils and something wet on her cheek, Vesna felt a different hand on her shoulder, a gentle touch.
There’s a baby, she thought, head down. The linea nigra means a baby. Where’s her baby?
‘All right, kid,’ a woman’s gruff, comforting voice said. Still crouched Vesna turned her head just a little and saw the sleeve of a paramedic’s uniform. ‘It’s all right now, sweetheart.’ And Vesna put her own hand to her cheek and found that she really was crying.
*
Damn, damn. Parking up illegally behind the Botanic Gardens, Sandro was late, and sweating like a menopausal woman. What was he even doing here, now they knew it was …? Well, domestic. Messy, miserable, relationship stuff, no conspiracy after all. Sandro couldn’t have said, except there’d been something about the soldiers last night that had interested him. And maybe after all he was trying to wrest it back, to prove to the monstrous Maria Rosselli that there might be bigger forces at work here.
Opposite the army barracks he passed an old-fashioned bar, and glanced up at the original signage in tarnished gilt; the Bar dell’Orto was just the kind of place that would have tempted him in if he’d had time or excuse. Standing in the window a lad in camouflage fatigues, raising a glass to his lips with a tattooed hand, gave him a look; a couple of men in the dark berets and sand-coloured uniform of the higher ranks watched the new arrival curiously. Ten-past ten, and he had to be back down in Santo Spirito by eleven.
And when you were pushed for time, everything else slowed down. Somewhere in the bowels of the ancient shabby building, someone took an age to respond to the intercom that Sandro pressed repeatedly. The vast heavy doors took an impossible time to open electronically and then, once he’d found his way inside the converted convent that housed the logistics unit, to the gloomy little reception area, he encountered only obstructiveness. An attitude so guarded and obtuse it amounted to naked hostility.
It was the thing he hated more than any other. Having himself been a part of an organization like this, Sandro knew the mentality: keep close, give nothing away. And now he was on the wrong side of the glass screen, it made him want to commit murder.
A male and a female soldier in camouflage fatigues behind the armoured glass – who were they afraid of? A new Red Brigade targeting a sub-section of the administration of the smallest standing army in Europe? – went on chatting for a good two minutes before the seated man turned and eyed Sandro.
‘Yes?’ He was about thirty-five and exceptionally good-looking, which for some reason annoyed Sandro even further. That and the fatigues, irresistible to women, no doubt. A certain kind of woman, anyway: he tried to picture the expression on Luisa’s face if she saw the man. A name displayed on the desk – in a concession to the age of openness and accountability – read Canova. In theory Sandro could complain about his rudeness. Practice was a different matter.
Sandro didn’t even know if it was worth opening his mouth. Why hadn’t he taken the colonel’s name?
‘I spoke to one of your officers last night,’ he said, without much hope. ‘This is the Regional Command? Tall guy. Colonel. He said to come and see him if I wanted.’ Reluctantly he fished out his card and slid it under the glass screen. ‘It’s – about the Frazione Verde.’ The soldier took the card and turned his back on Sandro again. He said something to the female soldier, and her expression, lip curled, gave Sandro a good idea of what it was.
‘It is concerning?’ Sandro saw that the woman’s eyes never left Canova: he imagined there were rules about relationships that in this case, and probably plenty of others, were being ignored.
‘To do with roads,’ Sandro offered, leaning closer to the glass again. The soldier didn’t turn back for a good thirty seconds, but when he did Sandro, mastering himself, smiled.
‘Stupid of me not to take his name. I didn’t want to detain him, you see.’
‘Yes,’ said the soldier. Next to him on the reception desk was a newspaper. Reading upside down Sandro saw a headline: ‘ONE DEAD, ONE INJURED IN AFGHANISTAN’. That made it easier to control his impatience somehow: they were just boys, out there. This one might be a bastard, but … ‘Sorry,’ he said again.
The soldier looked athim, expressionless. ‘It would be Colonello Arturo,’ he said, with an exhalation of impatience. Slowly – still slowly – he lifted a telephone. Sandro stole a glance at his watch, and had to suppress a groan. Ten-twenty.
By the time the female soldier left him, having led him in ungracious silence to the man’s office in a high and distant corner of the old convent, it was ten-twenty-five. Sandro guessed that he had perhaps twenty minutes. What a waste of time. He knocked.
Arturo’s office was surprisingly small and dingy; he sat behind a wide desk covered with scratched imi
tation leather, surmounted by a computer and a small wire document tray into which, on Sandro’s arrival, he deposited a folded newspaper. Legs stretched languidly to one side of the desk, the tall officer, raising his head to examine Sandro in the doorway, seemed out of proportion to his surroundings, his limbs too long, attitude too relaxed. On the wall above his head was a crowded shelf of books and a small plaster bust.
‘Permesso?’ said Sandro awkwardly.
‘Ah,’ the colonel said, stretching. ‘It’s you. Mr Private Eye.’ He gestured to a chair against the wall. ‘Pull up a seat.’
As labyrinthine Italian bureaucracies went, Sandro reflected while he sat, the army probably had to be the weirdest. Forbidden by the constitution actually to go to war, sporadically dumped in some war zone or other under NATO’s aegis, to be shot at or, as now, blown up by the Taliban, most soldiers seemed to Sandro to spend their time either taking potshots on rifle ranges by the seaside, in endless convoy on the motorways, or else holed up in offices like these, twiddling their thumbs. Heirs to the Roman legionaries.
‘You said I could come,’ began Sandro tentatively. ‘It was about the Frazione Verde.’
Arturo looked at him as if working out whether there’d be any amusement in it for him. He smiled lazily.
‘D’you think they’ll last?’ he said, leaning abruptly over the desk towards Sandro and taking him by surprise, his long legs folding up like a grasshopper’s. He was bored stiff, Sandro realized: might well say more than he intended to, just out of ennui. How old was he … fifty? Ten years off retirement. There was a photograph of him on the shelf, in full dress uniform, hand on the pommel of a sword.
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