Dead Season

by Christobel Kent

  ‘He’s dead,’ Valentino had said blankly, and she’d thought, poor guy. Nothing bad had ever happened to Val, he was like a kid encountering death for the first time. Only Val was twenty-nine. She’d felt as if she’d aged ten years herself.

  ‘Yes,’ she’d said, and he’d took her hand and held on to it, just for a second but very tight. Then someone had appeared at the door: typical. Barely a handful of customers all month, and again some kid was waiting by the door, hopping on white trainers to be let in, looking at his watch.

  *

  Sweat bloomed, quite suddenly in the humid darkness, at Roxana’s temples, down her spine, the backs of her legs against the plastic of the steamer chair. Was it her imagination, or was it even hotter tonight? And the memory of the day – the awfulness of it, stuck in that airless sweatbox of a bank, trying not to think about Claudio Brunello, even the oblivious customer – that was what had brought her out in a sweat.

  It wasn’t an accident. Marisa had said that sharply, then almost immediately back-pedalled. ‘It sounds – well. Mugged, maybe, out on the lungarno near the barracks, the African market.’ She’d looked blank, trying to make sense of any of it. ‘They weren’t saying much according to Irene, she was frantic, of course. She can’t believe it.’

  ‘What? What?’ It made no sense. None whatsoever. ‘In Florence? But he’s supposed to be on holiday.’

  Roxana, thinking back to that stifling office, the air humming with the terrible reverberations of it, kept her eyes closed, and the sounds sharpened. Ma’s singing trailed off as she skipped the words she couldn’t remember, but the cicadas were deafening, sawing with rhythmic relentlessness in the big umbrella pine that marked the end of the garden.

  What did Marisa know, really?

  ‘So someone – do the police think someone did it? What – hit and run?’ Then worse had occurred to her. ‘Murder?’

  ‘No!’ That had got Marisa up out of her chair. ‘Are you insane?’ She’d put a hand to her chest, the bare tanned triangle of ribcage, not an ounce of spare flesh on her. ‘I don’t know what they think. I – there’s a possibility of suicide.’

  And suddenly aware of her position – a mere teller, sportellista sitting calmly in the office of her superior – Roxana had stopped asking questions. She’d just bobbed her head, sorry, but she’d rather wished for that small grey man, Sandro Cellini, to ask her questions for her.

  There was something Marisa Goldman wasn’t telling.

  Eyes still closed, Roxana sat very still. It was almost as though she could feel the overgrown foliage that surrounded her, hear it too, the banana leaves rustling against each other, a dry loquat leaf falling to earth, could smell the overpowering sweetness of orange blossom.

  And there was a crack, very close. The sound of something trodden underfoot and with it Roxana’s eyes snapped open, the sweat cooling fast on her forehead.

  ‘Who’s that?’ She spoke louder than she intended, leaning forward in the lounger, hands braced against the armrests.

  From inside Ma’s singing stopped. ‘Roxana?’

  Instinctively Roxana put a finger to her lips.

  Then Ma was standing on the threshold to the back porch, her face no more than a pale oval in the dark and any trace of the woman singing over her pans gone. Her mouth moved but no sound came out. Roxana seized her hand to still her and they both turned to look into the overgrown garden.

  A rustle. Then the great grey Persian from next door lolloped out from under the banana palm, stepping neatly between the dead leaves, leaping noiselessly up on to the terrace. It looked up at them from the rail with unblinking calm, opened its mouth in a single mew.

  ‘Get away,’ said Violetta Delfino with sudden savagery, leaning across Roxana and shoving the animal off its perch. Landing on all four feet, with silent dignity the Persian stalked away, its feathery tail upright in affront, the last of it to disappear back into the undergrowth. Not a sound.

  ‘It wasn’t the cat,’ said Ma, defensively. ‘It wasn’t.’

  And Roxana knew she wasn’t just talking about tonight. Could that ball of fluff, which could turn the right way up in mid-air and land without disturbing a leaf, have snapped a twig? Could Ma have spent all yesterday afternoon hiding from a cat?

  ‘Mamma,’ she said, concentrating very hard on keeping her tone steady, reasonable. ‘You know Babbo’s torch? You remember where he kept it?’

  Slowly the dark eyes came into focus, fixed on her and Violetta Delfino nodded.

  ‘Bring it to me.’

  In the few moments she was alone again on the porch, Roxana’s every sense was alert, tensed against panic. Would she know whether there was someone there, if that someone didn’t move a muscle? The cicadas scraped on like buzzsaws in the umbrella pine. Mamma was back, pressing the torch into her hand with trembling fingers.

  ‘Go inside now, Ma,’ instructed Roxana, but her mother didn’t move. ‘Not because there’s anything to be afraid of,’ she said, as briskly as she could.

  Ma stared fiercely into her eyes, as she had when demanding the truth of her as a child, Tell me. Tell me you didn’t stick your finger in the pie. Even though everyone but Ma knew, it had been Luca who couldn’t wait for dinnertime. She felt a sudden little surge of irritable love for her greedy, charming younger brother, a thousand kilometres away under a rainy sky, living it up in a grey northern city while they bickered their lives away.

  ‘There’s no one there,’ she said patiently, and even believed it. ‘I’m going to make sure the back gate’s closed.’ Fished the small rape alarm whistle from her bag and brandished it. ‘You’ll know if I need you.’ Smiling to show it was a joke. Mostly.

  And at last, with an angry sigh, Ma gave in. ‘The dinner’ll be cold,’ she said.

  ‘Five minutes,’ said Roxana. The porch door closed behind Violetta, and Roxana got to her feet.

  The wooden stairs down into the garden were rickety, at every step a loud creak, but her noisy movements provoked no answering sound from the undergrowth. There’s no one there.

  It wasn’t completely dark. There was a distant glow from the tennis court floodlights a kilometre away, a square of slatted bedroom lamplight from next door, through closed shutters. But as she moved under the great drooping leaves of the banana palm, Roxana turned on the torch, and cursed. God knew when the batteries had last been replaced; it shone with a feeble yellow beam, hardly enough to illuminate her own hand.

  Never mind. She switched the torch off, got out the battery and rubbed it between her hands, leaned against the palm trunk, and listened. She could hear the sluggish gurgle of the river, from here, and something else, something dripping. And she thought. Ma had said that yesterday he had come around the back of the house. But that wasn’t straightforward. The side door was kept locked. The back gate could be accessed only by an overgrown footpath, and you had to go to the end of the street, round the houses, scout around a bit. She’d have said, you’d have to know the area.

  The man had called her Signora Delfino, but if he’d known her, Ma would have recognized his voice.

  You’d have to know the area – or be determined. Desperate, perhaps.

  Roxana sighed involuntarily: was she really taking this seriously? It would seem that she was. Twenty-four hours ago she’d assumed that Ma had imagined the whole thing. But a great deal had happened in twenty-four hours, a great deal that was no one’s imagination. Brunello was dead, his kids were fatherless. Still something dripped in the undergrowth, nagging at her.

  She replaced the battery in the torch, turned it back on. The garden was no more than ten metres square, even if it felt like a full-sized jungle in the dark. This was where Roxana had grown up, hide and seek among what had then been stunted shrubs, waist high. The back gate, set in a two-metre fence, had always been kept locked, Ma terrified they’d find their way down to the river and drown. In half a metre of filthy water: it had been known. And an eight-year-old girl had been abducted from the local swim
ming pool, when Roxana had been twelve, found dead in the river thirty kilometres away a week later. Never, never, never talk to strangers, Ma had scolded, then when it turned out the killer had known his victim, Ma had gone silent and obdurate.

  In the dark Roxana moved towards the back gate, knowing she would find it locked and bolted as always and then she could switch off the torch and go inside. Eat dinner and try not to think about Claudio Brunello. As she pushed under the oleander – poisonous, Ma had told them all, over and over, don’t even touch it – the dripping was there, louder. It was getting on her nerves, and – ugh. Something squelched underfoot, boggy, wet overrunning her sandals, mud between her toes. Damn. The torch swayed in her hand, and the feeble beam lit up the garden tap, in the back corner, set against the fence. Dripping. A puddle had formed at the base of the pipe. Roxana sighed; removing her sandals, she stepped gingerly around the water and turned the tap to close it tightly.

  Tentatively she tested the only ordinary explanation out for size: Ma had been watering the plants. Well, she could ask, though she was fairly sure Ma had not watered anything since Dad’s death, which was why half the terracotta pots contained only desiccated twigs.

  Had the tap somehow loosened itself? It seemed unlikely, despite the regular fluctuations in water pressure. Or were the next-door neighbours, what, climbing over the fence and stealing water? But as Roxana tried hard to restrict herself to only the most innocuous possibilities, almost despite herself she raised the torch beam so that it shone weakly along the now damp leaf mould at the foot of the fence, nearly, but not quite, reaching the back gate.

  What was that?

  She kneeled, and the movement seemed to alter some connection in the torch because it blinked and faded, before strengthening again, suddenly too bright. Bright enough for her to see what it was that had caught her eye: some regular, familiar indentations in the damp soil.

  Footprints.

  They ran along under the fence, a walking pace, even weight distribution, Roxana would have said, as if she knew anything at all about the analysis of prints. The police – she considered them briefly, then dismissed the possibility. The police might know about footprints, although she wouldn’t have credited any of the ones she’d come across with knowing more about anything than she did. They might have whole labs of technicians, but none of them would be sent out to investigate a nervous old woman’s fear of strangers, the dark, loneliness.

  The steps stopped, feet planted perhaps ten centimetres apart, the impressions deeper, as if he’d stood here a while.

  He?

  The footsteps were not large for a man’s. But too big to be a woman’s, too wide, too deeply set. A heavy woman with big feet? She could picture no such person; next door was a widow built like a bird. A woman Violetta resented, more experienced in her widowhood, not much heavier than her Persian cat, always pacing and hurrying herself into emaciation, never sitting still long enough to eat. Roxana sat back on her haunches in the warm damp, and shone the torch back towards the house. It was still ominously bright. It would die on her, any minute.

  As her eyes adjusted, she could see the slatted rectangle of the salotto’s French doors, a square of light from the upstairs bathroom. A man could stand here and observe.

  He’d gone closer to the house, this man with modestly sized feet: a couple more steps then he’d stopped again, and looked. He had called out to Ma, I know you’re in there, Signora Delfino.

  There was something about that phrase. Had Ma just – made that up, unconsciously? Given a voice to the man and his intentions, turned him into a bogeyman, repeated a line from a story to frighten children, Little pig, little pig, let me come in? Might he, after all, have been a perfectly innocent delivery man?

  He had not come right up to the house; he had stopped. Something occurred to Roxana and she stood, quickly, and before the torch could expire, turned and took her own, hurried, smaller, lighter steps back to where she’d come, only a few metres to the left, to the fence, along the fence—

  To the gate. Which was not locked and bolted, as she had last seen it, as it had been for as long as she could remember, but hung just ajar, crippled and askew with one hinge right off. And the casing that retained the bolt was barely hanging from screws torn out of the soft and rotten wood.

  Don’t tell Ma, was what ran through her head, as though she and her naughty brother were whispering together in the dark. It might have been an accident. But as she stared, Roxana took in the violence of it, the split and torn wood. This was no accident.

  With a last flicker, the torch died.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  DAMN, THOUGHT SANDRO. DAMN. The bank. I forgot to go to the bank.

  He was sitting at the kitchen table, immobile in the heat; he even wished they could turn off the low-hanging light in its stained-glass, stile liberty shade. The coloured glow through the glass seemed to be giving out heat.

  It came to him as he followed Luisa’s slow, deliberate movements around the kitchen, trying, as he seemed often to be doing, to interpret her. Luisa needed interpretation because she was in her way a master strategist, a Machiavelli. She didn’t ask anything straight out, she checked the lie of the land. She talked to him over her shoulder as she fiddled with the peeling of an onion, about her own day.

  ‘The shop was full, can you believe it? We had out the autumn collections, boots and sweaters, and people were buying them.’ Shook her head in mystification. ‘Forty degrees outside.’ She chopped. Onion, carrot, celery, garlic. Parsley.

  ‘He knows what he’s doing, old Frollini,’ said Sandro mildly. Frollini – not much older that Sandro if truth be told – Luisa’s suave boss, was a bone of contention between them. Too fond of Luisa for Sandro’s comfort, too smooth, too rich. ‘The world’s changing. People want to shop in August.’

  ‘For ski jackets? For the dregs of last season’s things in the sale? Dragging round a city when there are woods and rivers and seaside? It’s not changing for the better.’

  Sandro smiled to himself: she knew how to soothe him, with her indignation. Luisa could tell even with her back turned what kind of a day he’d had and the way he was this evening; she wouldn’t stand in front of him in the doorway and say, Well? Did you ask about a mortgage?

  And he’d even been in a bank, too. Not, he thought, that he would go to the Toscana Provinciale for money, not even if that clever, watchful girl in the glasses – what had been her name? – was the manager rather than just a sportellista. What was she doing in such a place?

  With a wrench he tore himself away from his memory of the wary bank teller – Delfino, that was it, DELFINO Roxana on her little badge – unwilling, back to the matter in hand.

  ‘I’m sorry, darling,’ he said to Luisa’s broad back, as she lit the gas under the chopped vegetables. ‘I – it slipped my mind. The bank.’ A battered fan stood on the counter beside her, wafting the scent of onions.

  She washed her hands under the cold tap, rubbing them over and over, before she turned back to him.

  ‘It’s all right,’ she said easily, and he saw her look quickly around the room, taking in the old melamine-fronted cabinets, the dent in the stainless-steel sink. It showed all the signs of having been thoroughly cleaned; getting home from work an hour before him, at six-thirty, she must have set to straight away. To reassure herself that, with a quick brush-up, this place wasn’t so bad after all, they could stick it out?

  Or perhaps the first step towards getting it spruced up for sale. Probably both: that’d be like his little strategist, to kill two birds with one stone.

  ‘Tough day?’ she asked, sitting down and taking a sip of the drink he’d poured her, a glass of Crodino in which the ice had already melted to slivers; she tipped the glass from side to side, to hear them chink.

  He nodded, hesitating. Not quite ready to tell it all. Then remembered: he’d done something right.

  ‘I spoke to Giuli, though,’ he said.

  ‘And?’ Luisa set
her hands on her hips.

  ‘And you were right, she’s got a boyfriend, and it was him she went to the seaside with. Computer geek, by the sound of it. A technician.’

  ‘Well,’ said Luisa drily. ‘That’s better than – it might be.’

  Better than nightclub bouncer or pimp or debt collector or homeless junkie, was what she meant. The choices Giuli had made in her previous life did not bear too much contemplation.

  Sandro frowned. Lunch with Giuli seemed a long time ago, eclipsed by the memory of that battered body decaying in the gaseous heat of the ring road. He remembered her saying, I know a bad guy when I see one.

  ‘Actually,’ he said cautiously, ‘I think we should – well, maybe not stay out of it completely, but at least – give her the benefit of the doubt. I think she knows what she’s doing.’

  Luisa gave him a long look. ‘Fine,’ she said at last, and he saw her struggle to say it. She sighed, said it again. ‘Fine. You’re probably right.’

  ‘His name’s Enzo,’ he said. ‘I think she’ll bring him over, eventually. For inspection.’

  ‘Right,’ said Luisa, and he could see that for the moment, she had decided to be satisfied. ‘So tell me,’ she said. ‘About the bad day. Did you find him?’

  ‘Ah.’ Sandro rubbed his eyes, suddenly exhausted, and smelled the day on his hands. Traces that stirred disquiet in him: aftershave and disinfectant, soot and car exhaust and latex gloves. Traces of the old life; him and Pietro shoulder to shoulder, looking down at human remains. ‘Well, it’s complicated.’

  Luisa cocked her head, a gesture he knew of old, that meant, So tell me.

  And he told her, leaving nothing out. As he described Brunello’s wife, dignified in her crumpled linen shift, he saw Luisa’s mouth twist. Whose side could you come down on, after all?

  ‘Bring her here,’ she said, getting to her feet, rubbing her back. She had grown stiff and sore listening to the story, and the air was rich with the scent of the meat sauce that had cooked while they talked. Luisa crossed to the window and leaned out, looking for a breath of air. ‘Bring the girl here, after. I’ll take the day off.’