‘You’d forgotten this?’ Giuli was incredulous, and Wanda flushed.
‘Not exactly,’ she said. ‘It just seemed – so private. The subconscious, you know, so private you don’t even understand it yourself. I didn’t say because – well. It felt like I’d be betraying her.’
Giuli exhaled, exasperated. ‘Why do I get this from everyone?’ she said. ‘Flavia committed suicide … privacy doesn’t come into it. You were her only friend, it seems to me. Don’t you want to know what drove her to it?’
Wanda gazed at her. ‘I suppose you’re right,’ she said uncertainly.
‘I am right,’ said Giuli. ‘So tell me.’
The teacher took a deep breath. ‘I can’t remember all of it myself,’ she said slowly. ‘But it was extraordinary. It had everything. It was like the perfect dream. Symbols, emotion, danger, archetypes, revelation: the lot. You might have made it up, it was a perfect narrative.’
Wanda paused. ‘There was a palace,’ she said then, slowly.
Giuli sat quiet, mesmerized. It was just like a story. A ghost story, or a murder story. A big, dark palace – like the Pitti Palace, set up above a city like their own. A faceless man with a sword, hacking people to pieces and leaving them in bloody heaps, finds his way inside the palace. Flavia Matteo goes running through its corridors saying she has to find her baby before the killer does. Then there was something garbled about stockings and blue glass all over the ground stopping them catching the killer, but always, even in Wanda’s halting retelling of it, it was completely gripping. The chase, the terrible faceless man, then the revelation.
‘He got the baby?’ Giuli said. ‘He killed the baby? That’s pretty extreme.’
‘Dreams are extreme,’ said Wanda, with an effort. ‘Pregnancy hormones can do pretty extreme things too. Women dream of blood and destruction all the time. We’re not the gentle creatures people imagine us to be, are we?’
‘No,’ said Giuli, thinking of Flavia Matteo cutting her own wrists, thinking of the sinew and veins, of the deep breath you’d have to take before you made the first cut. Thinking of Sandro viewing the body. And Flavia dreaming of a baby cut to pieces.
Wanda was looking at her. ‘There was something else,’ she said.
‘What else?’ said Giuli, with dread.
‘She said, “He made me dance for him, to save the baby, and then I saw his face, before he killed the baby.” She said, I knew him.’ Wanda Terni’s own face was pale and tense, her eyes wide.
‘And who was he?’ The teacher shook her head. ‘Flavia wouldn’t tell me that.’ She squeezed her eyes shut. ‘It was as though she had to get to the end, to tell me what had happened in the end, and only when she got there did she realize she might have given something away. She said, “No, I didn’t mean he was a real person, no, no.”’
‘But she was lying.’
Wanda nodded. ‘I think she was.’
‘You were here,’ said Giuli, ‘when she told you?’
Wanda nodded again and Giuli shivered suddenly. ‘There’s no palace here,’ she said. ‘Could she have been thinking of, I don’t know, the Quirinale, of government buildings, city hall? Of what would happen when – if – Niccolò got to power?’
‘There are palaces everywhere,’ Wanda said, frowning with concentration ‘This city’s like one big palace. Have you never thought the streets are like dark corridors? You never know who’s around the next corner.’
Giuli saw the raised hairs on her forearm. ‘You’re cold,’ she said. ‘Let’s get walking.’
The sun, though, even at midday, seemed suddenly to have lost its ability to warm. They reached the top of the hill by dogged determination alone. Giuli realized she was like Wanda in her attitude to walking, or perhaps she just didn’t like the idea of having the freedom to think her own thoughts forced on her.
‘I’d better get back,’ said Wanda, fretting as they looked down at the city. The river shone lazily below them, a wide green band. Some sunbathers were stretched out along the fishing weir, distant specks.
‘All right,’ said Giuli reluctantly. The story haunted her, its ugly meanings circling with menace, just out of reach. It could be anything: it could be hormones, chemicals cooking up their own stories in Flavia’s bloodstream, the baby sending out its own warning signals before it knew anything of the world it would enter.
‘There was nothing else?’ she said as they set off back down, almost as an afterthought. ‘Just the dream.’ As if the dream wasn’t enough.
Their steps crunched on the gravel, the increase in speed as they headed downhill lending a sense of urgency they hadn’t felt on the uphill climb. Faster, faster they went, chasing something down.
‘There was something else,’ said Wanda, and she stopped abruptly. ‘Actually, there was. Just a small thing.’
*
He would be angry, thought Chiara. The dress hung on the back of the wardrobe, like her pale peach ghost, crumpled, sweated in under the arms because she’d run in it, running in heels like trying to struggle out of a trap. He wouldn’t like that, either, he wanted her delicate and feminine. She wondered where the iron was: wondered if she should take the dress to the cleaner’s before he saw it. It didn’t feel like it was hers. He’d bought it for her.
She’d had to run: she couldn’t have stopped, couldn’t have talked to Luisa: one word and Luisa would have her skewered. She could deflect her own mother, who so desperately wanted to believe her child, but Luisa had always been able to ferret out the truth. Chiara remembered as a child sitting on her lap, Luisa’s firm hand on her heel as she extracted a splinter, straight in with the needle, ignoring Chiara’s squeal, her writhing: ruthless, focused. Then holding up the splinter: there.
He’d sat in the car waiting for her when she’d gone to get her stuff: she hadn’t asked him up and he hadn’t said he wanted to meet the family. He’d known her dad was in the Polizia di Stato – sometimes she wondered if everyone knew – and what kind of lover wanted to be subjected to that scrutiny?
What kind of lover.
Was he her lover? Not yet. And as she lay still on the bed a sweat broke on her again. She’d run across the river to get away from Luisa and, reaching the other side, hurrying for the bus stop, she’d glanced down a sidestreet and she’d seen him. Leaning into a car window as easy as you like, as if he’d known the person inside for ever. The woman looking up at him from the driver’s seat, sly and certain. He’ll leave me, thought Chiara suddenly. Unless I do the things he wants.
‘I’ll show you,’ he’d said.
Chapter Nineteen
‘I’M SORRY,’ SAID VESNA, looking around fearfully. ‘I’d better check first. That Calzaghe’s not back, I mean. He won’t allow it, you see.’ Although Sandro thought she seemed as much afraid of Niccolò as she was of her boss.
They’d waited fifteen minutes, he and Niccolò Rosselli, inside the rusted gates to the silent hotel, time to reflect that it wouldn’t take long for nature to reclaim the Stella Maris, its flaking shutters and unkempt laurels and weed-clogged gravel. There was something about Rosselli’s dark, relentless misery that muddied Sandro’s own thoughts; his head was already back in Florence, pondering the significance of a police raid in the dark alleys of the Oltrarno. He had completely forgotten the errand Vesna had offered to run for him until he’d seen her hurrying along the wide sunny street towards them.
‘OK,’ she said now, coming back out of the hotel’s dark lobby. ‘He’s not here.’ Her eyes darted again from Rosselli to Sandro. There was something she wasn’t sure she should say, in front of the husband. ‘Quick, quick, come in.’
She looked different without her overall: she looked like any girl in the street, she looked free. You could imagine her just taking off, running for the train without a bag. That was what Flavia had done. Had it felt like escape? Or the opposite – capture? Running into a brick wall, the end: that would always be how someone like Sandro viewed suicide.
The staircase led
up to a long, light-filled landing and rooms leading off it.
‘I suppose we’d better not touch anything,’ said Vesna, fishing a key from her pocket and unlocking the door. The police hadn’t left tape up; perhaps they’d thought there’d be no need, with the hotel closed. Vesna pushed the door with a fingertip and, before they had a chance to decide who would be the first to enter, Rosselli stepped purposefully forward and through the doorway.
Even in the room’s shuttered dimness you could tell it was a mess. Vesna had her arms wrapped across herself in distress: even leaving aside that she’d found the body, her job, supposed Sandro, whenever she came into a room like this, would be to restore order to it, and the mess left behind after a death was disorder like no other. Possessions whose owner has gone, things once of value to someone, now worthless. Meaning drained from them.
Rosselli moved through the room before them. He stood and looked down at the bed first, the sheets creased and limp, pulled roughly back up; stood there a long time, it felt to Sandro, who was averting his eyes from the imprint of a dead woman’s body. The door to what must be the bathroom was ajar, but the shutters would be dosed there, too. Then Rosselli moved, stepped across to the small cheap wooden desk, with its writing set. The policeman had said Flavia took a piece of paper and set it on the blotter; she’d held the pen because it had her fingerprints on it. But nothing had been written.
Behind Sandro, Vesna stepped over to the long French doors and, taking a handkerchief from her pocket, turned the handle. ‘She had a balcony,’ she said. ‘One of the nicest rooms.’ She sounded apologetic. She pushed the shutters outward and a band of light widened in the room: Niccolò Rosselli’s face, grey and blinking, turned towards her.
‘They were open,’ Vesna explained. ‘The shutters, the window, they were open when I came in.’
‘Open?’ Rosselli seemed galvanized, lit up by the shaft of sun. ‘The door was locked, they said. The door to the room, as if that meant no one could have been in here, no one could have—’
‘You told the police?’ said Sandro swiftly, wanting to shut down that note he heard in Rosselli’s voice, of a kind of desperate hope.
‘Yes,’ said Vesna, ‘Of course. I told them I hadn’t changed anything.’
‘You’re sure you didn’t open them yourself?’ Sandro was intent. ‘Don’t you do that when you go into rooms to clean them, throw open the window first?’
‘I do sometimes,’ she said slowly. ‘But I knew something bad had happened. Even before – when she didn’t answer the door. I knew not to touch – I – I don’t know why. I just knew.’
‘And you told them that?’ She nodded uncertainly. ‘I heard them round the back, afterwards. The police, I mean. They went looking to see – if anyone might have—’ She stepped on to the balcony, Rosselli shoving abruptly ahead of Sandro to follow her, then the three of them were out there.
The balcony was generous but shabby, the paint on the balustrade flaking and loose, and about four metres from the ground. Rosselli stepped to the balustrade: Sandro came alongside him and they both looked down into a patch of tangled vegetation and the contrastingly neat garden of the condominium behind, where two swinging garden seats and four substantial loungers were set tidily around a handsome table. Sandro glanced at Niccolò Rosselli’s face, but it registered no emotion, only a kind of intentness.
‘But it’s possible,’ Rosselli said eagerly. ‘Someone could have climbed up here.’ Out of the corner of his eye Sandro could see no drainpipes or handholds: he could also see an elderly man watching them from the condominium’s rear terrace.
‘I don’t think so.’ Vesna’s voice was quiet, but certain.
‘Why not?’ Rosselli stood straight, hands clenched. She stepped around him respectfully.
‘Look,’ she said, and pointed, her finger a centimetre or so above the balustrade but not touching it. ‘The exterior hasn’t been decorated in twenty years. If anyone had come over here, the paint would have flaked off all over the place.’
The stone floor of the balcony was dusty, but no more than that. Vesna went on, quietly determined. ‘And whoever climbed up would have been covered with dust. You only have to blow on it –’ and she leaned and blew by way of demonstration, and the powdery blue distemper lifted obediently from the plaster ‘– and you’re covered.’
She stepped back. ‘Plus the old folks next door are so terrified of being robbed by Albanesi, they call the police when a stray cat comes into their yard.’
‘Albanesi,’ said Rosselli, but all the energy was gone as he looked dully down into the garden next door. ‘Yes, they always blame the Albanesi.’
The Frazione, Sandro knew, took a very liberal stand on the immigration issue for which the word ‘Albanesi’ had become shorthand: they were anti-racist and all the rest, but this seemed to him no more than a reflex. Would it save Rosselli, all this politics? Or anyone else, for that matter? Sandro wasn’t going to count on it.
‘I’m sorry,’ said Vesna, glancing back inside.
Rosselli said nothing. He turned abruptly and went back in, and before they could slow him – warn him, protect him – he walked straight into the bathroom. And stopped.
The huge marble bath stood like a tomb in the centre of the room, gleaming palely in the half-light. A crouched shape was on the tiled floor beside it: staring, Sandro realized that it was a towel.
‘You found her,’ said Rosselli, without turning.
‘Yes,’ said Vesna, and Sandro could tell it was only with an effort that she was holding her ground. And then, haltingly, as if unsure of whether she should say it or not, but in the end having to: ‘She was wearing her underwear.’
And it seemed to be the odd banality of the words that did for Niccolò Rosselli because he suddenly folded in on himself like a long articulated doll and was on his knees, leaning against the bath, and making a sound that Sandro only belatedly realized was sobbing.
He knelt beside the man: it was almost a relief to feel Rosselli’s back shaking under his hand. The bones: the man was thin, thin as one of those starved saints.
He was saying something over and over, trying and failing to get to the end of it. ‘She would never – she would never – she would never—’
‘Never what?’ said Sandro gently. He glanced sideways and saw Vesna’s eyes on him from the doorway, as if she wanted to say something to him but could not take one step further into the room.
‘Come on,’ he said into Rosselli’s shoulder, inhaling his acrid scent of sweat, despair and lack of food and sleep. ‘Let’s go downstairs.’
Abruptly, the room seemed horrible to Sandro; even though he had no belief in any single supernatural thing, it seemed to him a haunted place. Rosselli’s head turned, his gaunt face streaked with the drying tears, but something in him had been mastered. Had Sandro still been a policeman, he might have taken advantage of this opportunity to examine the dead woman’s husband for signs of guilt, for some inappropriate response. But the professional reflex seemed to have deserted him and instead he waited.
‘She would never let a stranger see her – unclothed,’ Rosselli said. ‘She put the underwear on for you.’ Looking across at Vesna. ‘Not to shock you.’
‘Not to shock me,’ repeated Vesna. Sandro felt something knot in his chest at the thought of Flavia Matteo’s modesty, and the futility of it: at the note of dull acceptance in Rosselli’s voice. He swallowed.
‘Downstairs,’ he said, and inserting his hands under Rosselli’s armpits, raised him bodily from the floor. Ahead of them Vesna moved across the room as lightly as a ghost and opened the door.
They parked Rosselli in a grimy lounger on the verandah. He’d been obedient enough coming downstairs and Sandro had been relieved not to have to carry him; at Sandro’s age, it would have been an undignified struggle to do more than prop him up.
He’d seen the watchful look in Vesna’s eye from the lobby below as, with painful slowness, they’d negotiated the wide,
ill-lit staircase with its monumental mahogany banister, and had interpreted it as her doubting his ability to make it to the bottom. But when they emerged on to the sunlit verandah, he saw she was trying silently to convey some different message.
‘A glass of water?’ she said, leaning down into Rosselli’s face as if talking to someone very ill. ‘Or perhaps – ah – coffee?’ Sandro frowned. No coffee, she’d said, she wasn’t allowed. She straightened. ‘Perhaps you could help?’ she said to him, with a meaningful tilt to her head.
‘Water,’ said Rosselli vaguely, looking but not seeing her gesture, and she turned to go inside. ‘Perhaps a glass of water. Then we should go – home.’ He looked at Sandro. ‘Didn’t you say that?’ He spoke with a kind of blank relief, as if it had all been wiped clean. Sandro’s head ached with the effort of trying to understand him, and with dread of the journey home.
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I’ll just help the girl.’ And hurried after her.
He didn’t know where she’d gone: he went into the bright dining room, where the chairs were still stacked on the tables, save the two at which they’d sat when he’d been there before. He heard a chink from behind a door at the far end of the room and there she was, in a small old-fashioned kitchen with the kind of cupboards his mother’s kitchen had had sixty years before. They hadn’t been modern then.
‘I’m glad he didn’t want coffee,’ she said. She looked exhausted in the sunlight. She set two glasses and an elderly bottle of mineral water on a tray. ‘We refill them from the tap,’ she said, seeing him looking. ‘The bottles.’ She didn’t pick the tray up.
‘What did you want to tell me?’ Sandro asked, and then, ‘Do you really think no one could have climbed up on that balcony?’ But even as he said it the idea seemed outlandish: cat burglars, or some killer tracking Flavia down and cutting her wrists in the bath. Why? If they wanted rid of the Frazione, it would have been easier to kill Niccolò Rosselli. The certainty settled in him: she’d wanted to die, and even her husband had accepted it now. Did they really need to know why?
A Darkness Descending Page 24