‘Five hundred metres that way,’ said Cristina. ‘Take the right fork down behind the promenade, one street back from the front.’
Sandro nodded, pensive. ‘I don’t know if you’ll find anyone up at this hour,’ she went on, curiously, sliding his empty cup and plate towards her and turning to stack them into a wire basket to go into the dishwasher. ‘Gaetano … that’s Gaetano Tufato, he’ll be the policeman you talked to, can’t keep up with his rank, you’ll have to excuse me on that one. I’ve known him since he was thirteen … Anyway he told me they’d closed the place up for the meantime.’
‘I think he’s a vice-commissario,’ said Sandro mildly. ‘Tufato, I mean. I wonder why they did that? Are they not sure it was suicide, after all?’
Cristina smiled. ‘I would say,’ she said after a judicious pause, ‘that there’s more than one reason: you know how these things work.’ Sandro seesawed his head. Provincial police? Yes, he knew. ‘First, they don’t like Calzaghe – no one does. They won’t do him any favours. It’s a blot on the seafront, that place, and should be closed down. Then, the woman’s married to a politician, so they’re covering their arses.’
‘Yes,’ Sandro said, almost enjoying this. ‘Who knows when some big cheese might come down to make sure they’ve done things properly?’
‘That’s it,’ said Cristina, head on one side. ‘And – I suppose there’s always some doubt. A girl – young woman – dying like that. Do you think it was suicide? I mean, you knew her.’
‘I didn’t know her,’ said Sandro, and suddenly he felt sad. ‘I didn’t know her at all.’
It wasn’t until the dustbin man cleared his throat that Sandro realized he was still there. ‘I’ll show you where the Stella Maris is,’ he said. ‘It’s on my way.’
*
The day had dawned cool and bright and it was still early when Giuli found herself standing on the pavement outside the small primary school – the Scuola Elementare Agnesi, tucked behind Piazza Santo Spirito – where Flavia Matteo had worked. Term, Giuli calculated, would only just have started, and the place had the air of barely having woken up again after the long summer’s desertion. A battered double door stuck with posters and a peeling wall daubed with graffiti, a railing above it through which the green curls and tendrils of a climbing plant wound themselves. The children hadn’t arrived yet and it was quiet, but Giuli often passed this way during the day and if she paused and listened she could hear them behind the elegant building’s thick, five-hundred-year-old walls, through the long windows with their flaking paint and battered shutters, the unselfconscious piping voices of small children.
She could picture their hands up, eager for attention. Giuli had been to one school she’d loved, before it all went wrong – the first, the nursery. Scuola materna, the right sort of name. There’d been a teacher whose breast she’d once – aged four perhaps – brushed against and been so startled by its warmth and fullness that she’d pressed harder. Her own mother being so thin from self-neglect, Guili had marvelled at the feel of it, not daring to move away, and the teacher, if she’d noticed, had not moved away either but instead rested an arm lightly on her shoulder, keeping her safe. Giuli still marvelled at it, sometimes, the yearning persistence of that small physical memory. She wondered what kind of teacher Flavia Matteo had been.
The poster-stuck door opened abruptly outwards and the bristles of a broom emerged behind a small cloud of dust. As the dirt settled on the pavement a broad-faced woman in a janitor’s coat appeared in the doorway, big hands resting on her broomhandle. She stared levelly at Giuli and it occurred to her that the janitor was primed to watch out for child molesters. Something Clelia had said blinked in the back of Giuli’s mind, something about abuse.
‘Yes?’ said the woman. ‘Did you want something?’
Giuli pulled from her pocket the paper where she’d scribbled the half-dozen names Sandro had texted her, from Flavia Matteo’s phone. ‘Um – are any of these in yet?’ she asked, holding the paper out to the janitor. The woman stared.
‘Her,’ she said, eventually, pointing with a work-roughened finger to a name halfway down the list. ‘Teaches maths, first floor, room fourteen A.’ And grudgingly she stepped back to allow Giuli past and inside.
There was a gloomy terrazzo-floored passage with doors off it, ending in a broad flagstoned hall, and a wide, dusty staircase. Giuli’s heart sank. A maths teacher. Wanda Terni. It would be maths: Giuli’s worst subject at school. And Wanda sounded like a northerner: bullying, angry, hardline.
But she turned out to be nothing of the kind. A small, rounded woman with dark roots showing in short blonde hair and a harassed expression, sitting at a desk in a dusty classroom in front of a pile of dog-eared workbooks. She looked up and Giuli saw she was red-eyed with tiredness, or something else.
‘Can I help you?’ she asked blearily. And when Giuli hesitated, she said, ‘Is it about a pupil? Are you a mother?’ Looking at her watch: not yet eight. School started at eight-thirty.
‘No,’ said Giuli. ‘It’s about Flavia. Flavia Matteo. You’re – you were a friend of hers.’
‘Yes.’ The woman’s mouth tightened into a line.
‘You’ve heard,’ said Giuli. She’d only been officially identified last night – but the Oltrarno was a tight little place. News spread fast.
There was a wooden chair beside the desk, and unbidden Giuli pulled it up next to the woman and sat.
‘You were her friend,’ she said. ‘There was barely a handful of numbers in her phone, and yours was one of them.’
‘What were you doing with her phone?’ said Wanda Terni, almost savage: Giuli saw tears in her eyes. ‘What business is this of yours?’
Giuli spoke quietly, wanting to soothe her. ‘I work for a private investigator called Sandro Cellini. He’s – he went to identify the – he went with Flavia’s – with her partner—’ Spit it out, she told herself.
‘I know Niccolò,’ said Wanda, still tight-lipped.
‘Were you close?’ said Giuli, leaning towards her. ‘You and Flavia. I’m sorry to ask. I really am.’ She looked into Terni’s eyes, and unwillingly the teacher looked back. Some of the fight went out of her.
‘We had been close,’ she said, with weary misery. ‘They found her at the seaside.’ Her voice was flatly uncomprehending.
‘You don’t know why she would have gone there?’
Sandro’s text messages, rambling though they were, had mused on this point. Why did she go there and not in her own bathroom?
Reasons presented themselves. She didn’t want her husband to find her body. Who could commit suicide with their baby sleeping in the next room? Choose a hotel at random, at the end of a train line? Giuli didn’t believe in the random argument.
‘She never mentioned a connection with Viareggio to you?’
Terni shook her head, wordless.
Giuli spoke gently. ‘You were – her best friend?’
‘I suppose,’ said Wanda slowly, examining her hands. ‘She wasn’t one for big gangs of girlfriends. Not really.’
Giuli hesitated. ‘She didn’t – confide in you? Talk about personal things. Lately, particularly, I suppose. But ever?’
Wanda looked up at last. ‘Over eleven years she maybe talked to me – in that way – a handful of times. About her family. You couldn’t ask, or she’d clam up straight away.’
Giuli nodded: she knew that feeling. People asking questions you didn’t know how to answer. She felt Flavia’s presence in the room as she met the teacher’s gaze. ‘Her father was a violent man,’ said Wanda. ‘And her mother failed to protect her. Not uncommon, thirty, forty years ago; probably not uncommon now. She ran away from Rome when she was sixteen and enrolled in the university.’ There was a gleam of pride in her eyes.
‘Abusive? You mean—’
‘I mean he hit her,’ said Terni, her face set and pale. ‘Her mother didn’t want to know. That left its mark too. And when the mother died – well’
‘It was a great love affair,’ said Wanda. ‘They were two halves of the whole.’
‘She said that?’
‘You could tell. Their beliefs, their ambitions, their politics. They were absolutely committed to each other. He gave her the strength she needed, and she gave him the – sweetness, I suppose.’
‘She needed strength?’
Wanda shrugged, uncomfortable, and didn’t answer.
‘Depression?’ Giuli spoke gingerly. The shitty childhood, then the fallout. The cycle of abuse: she knew the terminology. From outside she could hear the chanting of children gathering before school, counting in some game, then a jubilant clamouring as they were released to run, and her heart lifted at the sound.
‘I thought she managed it.’ Terni looked away, evasive. ‘She had her techniques. She had Niccolò. She had her walking. She’d say she knew every park and garden in Florence. We used to go together.’ The voice dropped.
‘Used to?’ Terni examined her hands, and Giuli pressed a little harder. ‘You fell out? Grew apart? What? Was it – the baby?’
‘The baby,’ repeated Wanda, as if she’d never thought of that before. ‘I – I don’t know.’
Giuli shifted, uncomfortable. ‘People change, I don’t know. Busy with other things.’
Wanda went on. ‘Perhaps,’ she said, frowning. ‘I wasn’t aware of it – but I suppose it’s possible. I’ve known for a long time I can’t have children.’
Shit, thought Giuli. Outside the chanting had changed, someone’s name was being repeated. Olu, olu. It wasn’t clear if the child was being persecuted or urged on.
‘It’s possible I was jealous.’ Terni looked up. ‘I didn’t even know Flavia wanted a baby,’ she said, and there was a tinge of something – offence, injury, outrage. ‘They were always rather – offhand about that kind of thing. Well, Niccolò certainly. I always had the impression they thought babies were – for people who didn’t have a world to save. Plus you couldn’t imagine them … we all know how babies are made, and it wasn’t like Flavia was prudish or anything but …’
‘You mean you don’t think they had a sex life?’ Giuli was blunt.
Terni was flustered. ‘Oh, God, I don’t know. You never do know, do you, about people? It just seemed like it might be a factor. Anyway, I always thought they were agreed on it, one way or another, and with her background – after all, so many years together and she never got pregnant. Does that happen by accident?’
‘There might be reasons,’ said Giuli. ‘As you get older. Things change in the body.’ Terni didn’t meet her eye: she shifted ground. ‘So it was around then, around the time she got pregnant, that you – didn’t see so much of each other?’
The tired, dark eyes flickered over Giuli, weighing her up. ‘Flavia changed,’ she said finally. Giuli waited.
With a sigh Wanda put her face between her hands. ‘It was before she got pregnant. The baby was born at the end of July, so I suppose she got pregnant in – October? It was earlier than that I noticed something different. She’d been on some training course in Bologna … when was that? First weekend in September. And we – the teachers – we always have a meal at the end of summer, a week or so before term begins, get back into the groove, you know?’ Giuli nodded. ‘So we went to the usual pizzeria. There was something different about her then.’ Giuli tilted her head, waiting. ‘She was-up.’
‘Up?’
‘Happy, I suppose.’ Wanda frowned. ‘In another person, I suppose you might not have noticed. She hardly ate a thing. Jittery. Happy – high, almost. Maybe she and Niccolò – oh, I don’t know. I hadn’t seen her all summer – they’d been away in July then in the city in August, when I was away. She’d lost weight, that was all I noticed. She said she’d been doing more walking than usual.’
Giuli’s heart sank: she thought of the Addictions clinic.
Wanda sighed, absorbed in her memories. ‘At school we did speculate about it – about them. She could have been happy just because of the baby, couldn’t she? She’d got him to agree on a baby and she was happy.’ Again Wanda frowned. ‘Except that it wasn’t the kind of happy you’d associate with pregnancy … you know, comfortable, contented, placid. She’s – Flavia had always been lovely to look at, though she didn’t know it: when she got thinner she was something else, that fragile kind of beauty – you worried for her. And at our age …’ She shook her head, colouring. ‘I don’t know if you know what I mean?’
‘I do,’ said Giuli, who’d spent her youth starving herself.
‘And people commented. She didn’t like that.’ Again the lips tightened.
‘Did you comment?’
Terni nodded, and breathed out, a long sad sigh. ‘We went for a walk after term started and I started to wonder if she was ill. I said I was worried about her. She stared at me, like she was frightened of something, and she wouldn’t answer.’ Wanda’s face clouded and she looked away quickly, avoiding Giuli’s eye. ‘That was the end, really.’
‘Frightened?’ Giuli leaned forwards, intent. ‘You don’t – you never thought it might be drugs? Anything like that? She didn’t start hanging out with – that kind of person?’
Terni made a sound, an incredulous laugh. ‘Flavia? Never. No. She was a vegetarian, she barely drank coffee. Two cigarettes a day, and gave those up when she got pregnant. No way. Substances scared her to death.’
There was a silence. ‘Do you remember when you saw her last?’ said Giuli quietly, leaning back. ‘How she was?’
‘It was last week.’
Giuli gaped: she hadn’t expected that.
Terni took a deep breath. ‘I’d hardly seen her in months: I called in to see the baby but she was too tired for visitors. That’s what she said, the mother-in-law.’ She grimaced. ‘Then last week Flavia came into school, came up to see me, brought back some textbooks she’d borrowed, some excuse … I hadn’t lent her any books.’ She put one hand to the side of her worn face that was crumpled with regret. ‘Clearly she must have wanted to tell me something, or ask me something, I don’t know. It was busy – I was about to go into a lesson—’ She broke off. ‘This place. My God, this place.’
The noise level from downstairs was increasing almost to a din in the echoing stone labyrinth of the building: older children’s voices, and footsteps now on the stairs. The maths teacher’s gaze strayed to the door, then back, despairingly, to the pile of unmarked work on her desk.
‘So she said nothing?’
Wanda shook her head despairingly. ‘I didn’t have the time. She ran off. Just dumped the books and bolted down the stairs.’
‘It’s all right,’ said Giuli, without any hope that it was.
Wanda looked at her despairingly. ‘Half of them don’t have a wage-earner in the family in this school,’ she said. ‘They speak ten different languages. It got Flavia down too, but never seriously. She thrived on it, helping these kids.’
A head appeared at the door, a cheeky-looking North African kid with a backpack as big as himself. Wanda held up a hand. ‘In the corridor a minute,’ she said, with weary kindness, and the boy disappeared.
‘Right,’ said Giuli hurriedly. ‘But Flavia said nothing, no clue that – something was going on? Sometimes people give clues. They can’t quite come out with it but they drop hints.’
Wanda’s face, still directed towards the empty doorway, changed, clouded, and she turned back to look at Giuli. ‘I – I don’t know,’ she said, putting a hand to her head. In the corridor outside more children were arriving, shouting cheerful insults to each other.
‘No, she said wait,’ the African kid was insisting, just the slightest tinge of a richer accent to the Florentine Italian. Amazing, a kid from Tunisia or Morocco, turning into a Florentine. It seemed to Giuli in that moment to be a good thing, though she couldn’t have said why.
‘You think about it, will you?’ She got to her feet, carefully laid a ca
rd on the desk in front of the teacher. ‘If anything comes to mind, you can call me, yes?’
Wanda took the card in both hands. ‘But – won’t it just – isn’t it—?’ She stopped for a moment. ‘They think it was post-natal, don’t they? Isn’t that the most likely explanation? Isn’t it the least – problematic?’
‘You mean, let sleeping dogs lie?’ Guili said.
Heads were reappearing around the doorway. Wanda sighed. ‘All right, come in,’ she called, and the children began to jostle through the door.
‘You might find,’ said Giuli, leaning down to the woman and speaking quietly but clearly, ‘that the problem is, sleeping dogs don’t lie still after all.’
The maths teacher looked from the business card to Giuli, their faces only centimetres apart. The children paid them no attention, dumping bags on desks, pulling out chairs. Wanda said nothing. Giuli thought back to the beginning of their conversation, to almost her first question, still unanswered.
‘Why Viareggio?’ she said softly. ‘Why leave your baby and take the train to a seaside town full of happy families, and kill yourself there?’
‘I don’t know,’ said Wanda in a strained voice, leaning around Giuli to focus on the children. ‘Carlito,’ she called, ‘stop that.’
Her gaze lingering on the woman’s averted face, Giuli straightened.
Time to go.
But as she paused fractionally in the doorway Giuli saw that the teacher was looking back at her, pleading silently as if she wanted something, or had something to give.
Chapter Fifteen
AS LUISA KNEELED ON the pale carpet in front of a German teenager and pulled patiently at the lacing of a pair of high suede boots in a dark red colour they called merlot, the thought sprang into her head that she was close to not wanting to do this for a living for much longer.
Under her right arm there was an ache: it didn’t worry her, it had been there on and off for two years. She was more or less intact apart from the breast going, they’d said, all that complicated mesh of tendon and muscle under the arm should function all right; the lymph had been minimally disturbed by the operation but it still might play up, and it did. Her own fault: they’d told her over and over she need only have the lump removed. Too late to start regretting it now. And she didn’t regret it.
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