A Darkness Descending

by Christobel Kent

  ‘You might have saved her?’ said Sandro gently, leaning forward on the hard chair, elbows on his knees as he looked up at her. ‘I think there are others closer to her she might have talked to, and she didn’t. It seems unlikely that you would have been able to help her.’

  You never knew, of course. To look at her, Vesna might have been just the woman to talk to. But he couldn’t say that.

  The maid glanced down at the floor ‘I know,’ she muttered. ‘I know, I know.’ Shutting him up.

  Sandro could see her unfocused stare, and he knew she was remembering something terrible. It was an awful moment, seeing what was left when life had gone; Sandro had seen enough of it himself. There’s so little in a human body, when the brain’s stopped working, the lungs, the heart. He would not ask her about that. Not yet.

  ‘Did you talk to her at all?’ he asked. ‘Did you – I don’t know, I expect it’s hard, guests come and go. But did you form any impression of her at all?’

  Vesna raised her head and looked at him curiously, as if this was something she had not been asked already. ‘Impression?’ She straightened, leaned back in the chair and looked up at the dusty plaster cornices of the ceiling, her bare legs stretched in front of her; he could see the downy hairs on them. She wore ugly rubber overshoes like a medical orderly, but her ankles were fine-boned. Sandro averted his eyes.

  She brought her head down and looked at him. ‘She was frightened,’ she said, sounding surprised. ‘That’s the impression I had of her.’

  ‘Did you say that to the police?’

  Slowly Vesna shook her head. ‘No – I – no. They didn’t really ask me – that. And I don’t think they would understand what I mean.’ She chewed her lip, eyes dark.

  Frightened. Of what? Of whom? ‘The room was locked,’ said Sandro quickly. ‘When you found her? No one could have—’

  She stared at him. ‘The door was locked, yes,’ she said. ‘From the inside. I had to use my pass key to get in.’ She passed a hand over her face, and Sandro shifted in his chair at her discomfort. ‘Her key was on the dressing table. The police took it.’

  There was a brief silence. Then: ‘Why do you think she was frightened? What gave you that feeling?’ He wondered: if Flavia Matteo was planning suicide, she might well have been afraid. What would that fear have looked like? He felt something, in the bright clean sunshine, he felt the presence of darkness through the door that led back into the lobby, at his back.

  He must have moved, turned his head, because Vesna said tentatively, ‘Do you want to see? Her room?’ Sandro almost shook his head, because the truth was he dreaded even going back into the lobby.

  ‘I know what fear is like, perhaps,’ said Vesna when he didn’t answer, and for a moment he thought she was talking about him. ‘I know how people smell, when they are afraid. When you are in a room with fourteen people in a house, not knowing whether you will be shot if you come outside?’

  Sandro remained silent. This was beyond his experience. ‘When your mother does not return when she’s only gone to buy bread and you go to look for her? You can smell your own sweat, you can’t stop it. She was like that, Flavia Matteo. She was like an animal, so thin under that linen blouse. I could see the sweat on her neck, and I could see her eyes, looking, looking, and her breathing, it was very light and quick.’

  The maid exhaled, smoothed the skirt of her overall, her look turned inward, talking in a rush as though all of this had only just come to her, all at once. ‘Her sheets were like the sheets of a child who can’t sleep, a child with a fever. I would have changed them but he does not allow it. Sheets changed every three days, but I only did her room the first morning. After that – it was “Do not disturb”.’ Her eyes flickered.

  Sandro held her gaze: there were so many people, so many potential witnesses, it wasn’t worth asking a thing because they didn’t notice anything. But Vesna was different. He took a chance.

  ‘Do you think she was afraid of – someone? She thought someone might come to find her, someone was looking for her? It might be why she stayed in her room.’ Even as he said this, it didn’t make sense to him. Was she hiding? She got up at dawn to come here, she wasn’t fleeing someone in the street. And she’d been before; this wasn’t after all a random choice.

  On the evidence it seemed to Sandro more likely that she had come here to find someone than to escape someone.

  Vesna crossed her arms, thinking. Shook her head. ‘It was more like – she was ill. Afraid of something – in her own body, in her own head maybe.’

  Was that how post-natal depression manifested itself? Sandro didn’t know, did he? Was what Luisa had experienced post-natal depression? She hadn’t been frightened; she’d been like a dead thing. Again, he didn’t know. He was a man after all.

  Vesna went on. ‘And she did come out, that first day.’ She frowned, thinking intently. ‘She didn’t seem afraid to go outside. That wasn’t it. She went into the town.’ She raised her head and blinked.

  ‘She did? She went for a walk?’ Like me, thought Sandro, an early walk, to clear the head. And suddenly he thought, I’m not here alone, though, am I? Damn. He looked at his watch: eight-thirty. Would Rosselli be awake? Would he wait, patiently, eating breakfast at the hotel, for Sandro to return? Somehow Sandro doubted it: he stood up in sudden impatience.

  Vesna looked at him, barely registering his movement. ‘She went out – I thought she was … I thought she needed something, I heard her downstairs asking Calzaghe where to find something. He was giving her directions. I heard him tell her.’

  ‘Really? Can you remember what she was looking for?’

  Slowly Vesna shook her head, still looking up at him like a child. ‘I don’t know. He said – what did she say? Something about, back towards the station. Next to – yes. Next to the pizzeria there’s one, he said. But I don’t know one what.’

  ‘OK,’ said Sandro, thinking furiously. ‘OK.’

  Vesna got up, awkwardly. ‘It’s important, isn’t it?’ she said, biting her lip. ‘I should have said.’ She hugged herself.

  ‘Calzaghe should have said,’ countered Sandro. ‘Did he – tell the police, I mean? Where’s his mother’s place? I should talk to him.’

  The maid looked away, uneasy. ‘I’m sure he didn’t tell them anything,’ she said. ‘He doesn’t like the police. He didn’t want to give them any reason for blaming us – for what happened. He said, Give them the chance and they’ll pin it on us.’ She hesitated. ‘Except he always pins everything on me. His mother’s place is in the hills, behind the station. She’s dead, it’s her old apartment. He goes there – for his leisure time.’ She studied her feet in the ugly rubber clogs.

  ‘Leisure time,’ said Sandro. ‘Right. Well, I wouldn’t want to disturb him. I can have a look around myself. He directed her to – the pizzeria, you said? Towards the station?’

  ‘I suppose he meant the Venere.’ She looked paler than before. ‘It’s on the way there.’

  Almost to himself Sandro said, ‘But there’s the husband. I’ve got to get back to him.’

  ‘The husband,’ she repeated. ‘I had a husband, once. In Bosnia.’

  ‘You look too young,’ said Sandro in an attempt at gallantry, wanting to bring colour into her face. He thought, I won’t ask what happened to the husband.

  ‘It must be terrible for him,’ said Vesna with sudden feeling. ‘For the child. The rejection. The child is not enough to stay alive for?’ Her hand came up to her face again but still Sandro could see no tears.

  ‘I can go,’ she said abruptly. ‘Why not? There’s nothing for me to do here. What can he do to me? I can go and see what there is next to the pizzeria. If you give me your number, I can ring you. Or I can tell you if Calzaghe comes?’

  She pulled a battered pink mobile from her pocket, the kind a child might own, and deftly moved her thumb across its keypad. ‘You give me your number, I will call you immediately, and then you’ll have my number?’ She frowned, biting h
er lip, and Sandro understood that this was not usual for her, this kind of exchange of trust. He repeated his number to her, and felt his phone blip as she dialled it. He took it out and pressed Reject.

  ‘OK,’ he said. ‘I have to go.’ But something held him there a minute longer.

  The ultimate rejection. Was that what Flavia Matteo had done? Was it rejection or love? Was she hiding or seeking? Was she afraid of herself or another? Vesna stood there in her creased and faded overall with her arms folded tight across her body, holding something in.

  She watched him. ‘But she was not a bad woman,’ she said, when he did not make a move to go. ‘She was only afraid.’ He said nothing, but waited.

  ‘In the bath,’ she said, with a great weariness, and at last he saw it, a gleam at the corner of her eye, the tiny overflow on to her pale cheek but now she did not put a hand up. ‘In the bath, when I found her, she – she was not naked. She put on her underwear. She did not want to be naked, found like that.’

  Sandro saw her hands tremble in her lap.

  ‘It’s nothing,’ she said blankly, as if this small, terrible observation had drained her.

  Flavia Matteo was not a bad woman: she was afraid.

  ‘No,’ said Sandro. ‘It’s not nothing.’

  *

  When the private investigator had gone, Vesna walked slowly into the back room off the lobby, and between Calzaghe’s cluttered desk and the filing cabinet and the coat rack with his old coats smelling of grease and sweat, she sat down and cried. She cried for about twenty minutes, not worrying about the noise because no one could hear, and then she stopped. There always came a moment, with tears, when you had to stop because you thought, what next? I can’t cry for ever. She stood up, removed her apron and walked out into the sun.

  Chapter Sixteen

  ‘YOU TALKED TO HER?’

  The phone bleeped: another call trying to get through. ‘Wanda,’ said Giuli. ‘She’s called Wanda.’ She was in the cloister of the Women’s Centre, pacing. Could she lose her job, skulking like this, trying to get confidential information out of people? Spying. She held the phone away from her face. Enzo, it said. Hold call and answer?

  ‘Just a second,’ she said. Then to Enzo, wary, ‘Caro? Hold on a sec. This won’t take a minute, I’ll call you back.’ He didn’t get a chance to respond before she switched back to Sandro.

  ‘It’s Enzo,’ she said.

  ‘Right,’ said Sandro and his voice dropped, despondent. ‘What?’ said Giuli. He liked Enzo, didn’t he?

  ‘I might have landed him in it,’ said Sandro wearily. ‘The Frazione got broken into last night.’ A heavy sigh. ‘To be honest, I’d forgotten about it. Like a bad dream, you know? The avvocato, Bastone, he called me at God knows what time … two in the morning. The police had been, something about computers. I said Enzo’d be the guy to help him get things back to rights. Bastone doesn’t seem to be able to find his own backside with both hands.’

  ‘Funny, isn’t it?’ said Giuli, softening. ‘You’d go to Enzo with a problem rather than leave it to a lawyer with half a dozen letters after his name.’

  ‘He’s a good lad,’ said Sandro, reticent as ever. ‘Are we still coming to dinner tomorrow night?’

  ‘Oh, God,’ said Giuli. She’d forgotten.

  ‘No problem,’ said Sandro. ‘We can do it another time.’

  ‘No,’ said Giuli reluctantly. ‘It was Enzo’s idea. I can’t cancel for him, can I?’

  ‘I guess not,’ agreed Sandro gloomily. ‘And Luisa’s keen.’

  There was a silence in which they each reflected on their good fortune, and the duties it entailed.

  ‘So,’ said Sandro. ‘Wanda. Flavia’s friend, right?’

  ‘She didn’t have many friends, is what I found out. She and Niccolò were joined at the hip. The only thing she did for relaxation was go on long walks in every park and garden in the city, she smoked two cigarettes a day until she got pregnant, no drink, no drugs.’

  Giuli sniffed, there was just an edge of autumn to the wind and her nose was running. Sandro remained silent.

  ‘According to Wanda, Flavia changed just before she got pregnant: she lost a lot of weight and was – distracted. Preoccupied. Looked beautiful, said Wanda. She put it down to hormones, maybe.’ Dutifully she repeated all she’d been told: dates next because she knew Sandro would want to know precisely, his policeman’s brain. ‘It would have been a month or so before she got pregnant: Wanda dated it from when they went on some training course in Bologna in September.’

  ‘Bologna.’ It struck her as entirely typical that Sandro was interested in Bologna and not hormones.

  ‘But no other friends? She didn’t confide in this Wanda about what had changed? If anything.’

  ‘The opposite,’ said Giuli. ‘Before, she’d started to loosen up – she’d had a hard time as a kid, said Wanda, and then her relationship with Niccolò’ – how had she described it? – ‘was always very high-minded, very intense, didn’t allow for girly chat, was the impression I got, or maybe she just wasn’t that type of woman. Flavia had started to open up in recent years – but only to Wanda, from what she said. Then this weight loss, this hormonal thing if you like, and she clammed up. Shut everyone out.’

  Sandro grunted uneasily. ‘Hormones,’ he said. ‘I suppose there are theories about women of a certain age.’

  ‘Like me?’ said Giuli lightly.

  ‘Not like you,’ he said. And cleared his throat. ‘Though myself, I think after forty if a woman loses weight, people don’t generally think she looks great, whatever they say. They think she’s got cancer.’

  Or something. Giuli realized she hadn’t told him yet, about the Addictions clinic. Who was she protecting? Flavia Matteo was dead. It felt like Giuli was somehow protecting herself: don’t judge me, don’t judge her. People make mistakes.

  But the one person she could trust was at the other end of the line, listening. And addictions didn’t come out of nowhere, you had to have your need, and you had to have your dealer.

  ‘Cancer?’ Giuli said. ‘I don’t think it was cancer. But I think she had a – a problem.’ She cast about, trying to make sense of it, the non-drinking vegetarian. ‘An – addiction.’

  ‘I thought you said no drugs?’ Sandro was incredulous.

  ‘No, she was frightened—’

  Of drugs, she was going to add, but Sandro jumped in. ‘Frightened?’ he said, too quickly. ‘That’s what the girl said too. You don’t think she was trying to come off something, coming out here? Cold turkey, kind of thing?’

  ‘What girl?’ said Giuli.

  ‘The chambermaid in Flavia’s hotel,’ said Sandro. ‘The girl – woman – who found her body.’

  Giuli struggled to get her head clear. ‘Withdrawal?’ She shook her head, slowly. ‘As far as I can tell she was seeing someone here in the Addictions clinic more than a year ago. Around the time, I suppose, that she lost the weight. She stopped going after she got pregnant.’

  ‘That doesn’t mean she came off it,’ said Sandro. ‘Whatever it was.’

  Giuli hadn’t considered that. ‘But the baby …’ She stopped, choked.

  ‘The baby was healthy. Is healthy. She might just have been lucky.’

  Lucky. Not really: neither of them spoke.

  ‘I’ll try and find something out,’ she said eventually. ‘I’m a bit worried – about pushing things here, though. It’s delicate, what with them being colleagues and all.’

  ‘Tell me about it,’ said Sandro, with feeling. ‘Talking of colleagues—’ He paused. ‘Ex-colleagues, Pietro gets in touch today, after weeks, asking about Rosselli.’ He frowned. ‘Something’s not right, Chiara maybe. Or maybe it’s me: we communicate mainly via Gloria and Luisa these days.’

  Giuli heard the unhappiness in his voice and didn’t know what to say. ‘Look,’ she said uncomfortably, ‘I told Enzo I’d call him back. Everything OK there? Otherwise, I mean?’ Because how could it be, really? ‘How’s
Niccolò?’

  There was a long sigh. ‘Rough,’ said Sandro. ‘He’s pretty rough. He’s inside eating breakfast.’ She pictured Sandro standing in the sun outside the hotel, twitchy at being cooped up with a grieving man. ‘It seems pretty clear Flavia killed herself. The maid gave me a bit of background.’ He paused. ‘Nice girl. I suppose – I suppose we’ll be back this afternoon, if he’ll agree to leave here now. He wouldn’t yesterday. I haven’t told him about the break-in yet.’ There was a pause.

  ‘Look,’ he said, ‘if you see that Wanda again, can you ask her if she can look over the names in the address book of Flavia’s mobile? Well, their mobile, I suppose. The joint mobile. I suppose I can text you the list of names.’ He sounded vaguely flabbergasted at the idea of the technology involved. ‘To identify them. There might be someone else you can talk to.’

  ‘Sure,’ said Giuli. ‘Um – give him our – our best regards, will you? Our condolences.’ Sandro grunted and hung up.

  Giuli looked at the mobile a while. She genuinely could not remember a time when she hadn’t had one; there’d always been some dodgy Chinese fake or piece of stolen goods to be had for next to nothing. Cigarettes, a little fold of cash, and a mobile. The panic if you lost it, the frantic attempt to remember the lost numbers, the messages, the people who might be trying to get hold of you. She stepped out of the cloister and into the sun that shone on the scrubby grass quadrangle.

  When it was allocated to the Women’s Centre, the convent had been made over to be as plain and penitential, it seemed to Giuli, as possible. No orange trees or statuary, the vaulted cloister scrubbed clean, only a fragment or two of eroded frescoes bearing sparse witness. A calming environment: perhaps the theory was that if they left any of the religion behind it might stir up negative feelings among the sinners who visited the Centre. Guilt, say.

  Giuli felt the smooth, warm weight of the phone in her hand. Did she feel guilty, was that her trouble, guilty for having wasted her life and abused her body and done one or two stupid, ugly things? But wasn’t guilt just – natural? In a way it made the world function. She tried to imagine a person free from it. Those well-fed politicians acting like blue-arsed baboons with teenage immigrant girls in some brothel in Rome, did they feel guilty? Maybe it was part of the fun for them.