The Viper

by Christobel Kent

  ‘What about the children?’ she said. To her surprise she had almost finished her drink. She felt a warmth, a softening, as she sat back against the velvet upholstery. Beyond the large windows the piazza twinkled in the twilight.

  ‘Benedetta?’ He was looking shifty now, undoing a button on his impeccably cut tweed jacket. Scottish tweed, Italian cut, he always specified. Avoiding her eye.

  ‘We could start with her,’ Luisa said. ‘I was in the emergency room this morning and she was brought in on a stretcher. An overdose, apparently.’ She spoke carefully, eyeing him, but she saw no shock or even surprise. ‘It sounded like she was going to be all right,’ and belatedly he murmured something like relief. ‘I don’t know what kind of drugs, I mean, whether it was sleeping pills or …’

  Enrico sighed. ‘Probably tranquillisers,’ he said. ‘I know she’s done it before. She’s always been – sensitive. Delicate, if you like. Her mother despaired of her.’

  ‘Always?’

  He shrugged. ‘Perhaps not as a teenager.’ He hesitated, never enjoying a conversation where his age might come into it. ‘Of course I hardly knew her then but – no. I remember her as a normal sort of adolescent. Parties, dressing up, boyfriends. All that.’

  ‘So, it was marriage and settling down that did it?’

  Frollini shrugged, evasive. ‘Possibly. It doesn’t suit everyone. Switzerland certainly doesn’t suit everyone. I wasn’t surprised when she came back.’

  ‘All this time, though,’ said Luisa, ‘I thought she was still up there. You didn’t say. Did they keep her under lock and key? And I hear she lost –’ She broke off, not wanting Frollini to remember that Luisa too had lost a child, and the understanding looks that would entail. But she need not have worried: as usual Enrico showed no sign of having been listening properly.

  ‘The whole business was a source of pain to her mother,’ he said sententiously. ‘Not all things may be talked about, you know.’ Luisa opened her mouth to laugh at this, from him, but he was leaning forward across the little table, almost tipping the glasses, so close she could smell his Cuir de Russie. And he seized her hands. ‘But what were you doing in the emergency room, cara?’

  ‘That reminds me,’ she said, gently withdrawing her hands from his to fish in her bag. ‘I need to take a pill.’ Seeing his eyes darkening with alarm at the sight of the antibiotics, Luisa extended her leg to show him the bandage, which she had reapplied more discreetly. ‘I cut myself on some barbed wire.’ He recoiled, grimacing, and she tucked her leg back under the table, satisfied with the effect. She signalled for a glass of water.

  ‘What about the son,’ she said, sitting back, casual. ‘Benedetta’s stepbrother?’

  ‘Bartolini?’ Frollini appeared indifferent. ‘I don’t know the man. He runs the estate for her now. He spent a little while in the fashion business at the beginning but it didn’t suit him. A dilettante like his father.’ He sniffed and Luisa detected a tinge of jealousy: the younger man, turning up his nose at the rag trade.

  ‘Well, it does take talent,’ she said warmly. ‘Fashion, I mean.’

  ‘I suppose it does.’ Frollini was mollified. ‘And he’s protective of his sister. Half-sister.’ A pause: they both sipped their drinks. ‘It can’t be easy, not being the heir,’ Frollini conceded.

  Luisa sat up straighter. ‘No?’

  ‘Well, he wasn’t the prince’s son, was he? I imagine the money goes to Benedetta.’ He shrugged. ‘Perhaps Mamma has made provision for him. His own father certainly left them on their uppers until Salieri came along.’

  Luisa took a sip of her drink, thoughtful. ‘He doesn’t seem to hold it against her,’ she said. ‘Benedetta, I mean. He was really distressed when I saw him in the hospital.’

  Frollini nodded, complacent. ‘Well, half-blood’s better than no blood relation I suppose. Neither of them has anyone to pass it on to. I’m sure I don’t know whose hands that property will end up in. Imagine that.’

  There was a silence during which Luisa knew he was contemplating his own two plump sons and five grandchildren with satisfaction. She moved on before he got on to looking sorrowfully at her.

  ‘I expect you’ve heard about what happened down there,’ she said carefully. ‘The murders? Was there any connection between them? The Salieri and the – hippies?’

  Enrico didn’t reply: instead he sat back and then the waiter was there beside them, bending in his long white apron with her water and gone again in a quiet flurry.

  ‘I have heard about it,’ he said. ‘I don’t think the son was around when those people lived at Sant’Anna.’ He looked pale, suddenly and uncharacteristically.

  Breaking her rule again, she took his hand, impulsively. ‘It’s awful, isn’t it?’ she said with feeling, a chill right around her heart as she remembered the damp air, the smell of the leaves, the deep cleft in the valley. ‘It’s horrible. Those bodies. I knew her, you see. I knew her.’

  ‘You knew her?’ Frollini was aghast. ‘But how could you have?’

  ‘Oh, very briefly,’ she said, ‘very briefly. She wasn’t someone you forgot, though.’

  Enrico Frollini settled back on the banquette, but he looked shaken. ‘She mustn’t hear about it,’ he said, ‘the Princess Salieri. It would upset her to hear about it.’

  ‘But she must have already heard about the murders?’ Luisa wondered if he’d lost his marbles. How could it be kept from her? And why? Because her long-dead husband had been sleeping with one of them? The only man Sandro had mentioned was Gorgone, Nielsson’s lover.

  Could it be him? Enrico must know something. But she hesitated. He’d taken his hand out of hers. Usually it was the other way about. His face changed, as though something was dawning on him for the first time. ‘I heard Sandro’s involved with it,’ he muttered, avoiding her eye. ‘Perhaps he could just … keep them out of it?’

  Of course, Enrico Frollini would know about Sandro’s involvement. He knew everything. Or perhaps it was common knowledge; Florence was so much a village. Sandro was probably talking to the old woman right now. Not for the first time, Luisa wished she’d never embarked on this ridiculous deception. She wanted to talk to Sandro; her hand crept to her mobile in her pocket.

  ‘Yes, he’s been called in,’ she said, but Enrico had sat back, ashen, and was waving a hand, weakly impatient, at her.

  ‘Never mind,’ he said. ‘Forget I said anything.’

  Holding on to the mobile still, she allowed him to pay the bill. She waited, saying nothing more, eyeing him as he patted down his pockets, retrieved his glasses, put away his wallet, fumbled for his coat, and his colour returned.

  He was almost back to normal as they said goodbye under the lights, pulling on his silk-lined gloves, buttoning the lovely vicuna coat and then kissing her on both cheeks. Not lingeringly, though, and there was no embrace.

  ‘Always a pleasure, Luisa,’ he said. But as, walking away from him past the bright café terraces and towards the painted carousel, she turned quickly back to see him still standing there, Luisa had the distinct impression Enrico Frollini had never been so glad to see the back of her.

  She got out the phone and dialled.

  Chapter Thirteen

  THEY CLIMBED OUT of the car without a word, as if both in agreement that the car had become stuffy, but they weren’t going anywhere. His hands in his pockets, not looking at Sandro but at the trees on the other side of the road, Pietro finally spoke.

  ‘Well,’ he said uneasily, ‘I can see why – you’ve kept quiet about it.’

  Sandro was still taking gulps of the fresh damp air. They were standing outside Lotti’s house, a squat stone dwelling side-on to the road. The village sat a little way above them, grey in the twilight. The sun had almost completely gone from the narrow valley: just the tips of the trees on the eastern ridge were golden in the dying rays. He felt curiously lightheaded. It was done. Pietro knew and despised him.

  ‘It’s all right,’ said Sandro, stiffly. ‘It�
�s –’ but Pietro’s arm was around him, so sudden and forceful he almost lost his balance.

  ‘You’ve got nothing – nothing – to be ashamed of,’ said Pietro fiercely into his ear, before releasing him.

  There was a sharp honk and they turned to see one of the blue buses that served the region round the bend below them. They paused, standing back against the car to let it pass in a hiss of oily exhaust.

  ‘So,’ said Sandro as it disappeared. ‘We could add me to that list of suspects, couldn’t we?’ Jamming his hands in his pockets.

  ‘I’d have Luisa in the frame before you,’ said Pietro, halfsmiling, but the words turned Sandro’s heart over.

  ‘She never – knew anything,’ he said.

  ‘If you say so,’ said Pietro, shaking his head and smiling, just in time. ‘Maybe we should put Gianna Marte on the list, too, what do you think?’

  They turned towards Lotti’s house.

  The windows were all shuttered but one, either in error or because it simply didn’t matter now the man was dead. In the small patch of garden there was a stake with a chain: he kept the dog outside. The dog that was now dead. He had liked the dog more than any human, and he’d left it outside. Not a sentimental man. Sandro turned to see Pietro watching him, and he moved along the side of the house towards the unshuttered window. Reluctantly he peered inside.

  A sitting room. In the dim light its surfaces shone blue and empty. A coffee table. A kitchen corner with counter. A telephone. A cold, dead, place: hadn’t Pietro said that? A place where a man sat alone, in silence And all around them the village was silent, and grey. Soon it would be dark. Sandro made a decision, and strode back to the car.

  ‘We’re going to La Vipera,’ he said, before he could change his mind. ‘And in the car. If we walk from here they’ll see us. They’ll be wondering already by the time we get back down.’

  Sant’Anna seemed deserted, though, as they bumped between houses along the potholed road, not a pedestrian, not a dog and all the windows shuttered.

  ‘See?’ said Pietro, peering through the passenger window. ‘Ranks well and truly closed. Like getting blood from a stone getting more than a yes or no. Half the houses are derelict now, anyway. Kids moved to somewhere else, Germany or Canada or wherever, if they want more out of life than to sell wine to tourists.’

  The bus was moving off from its stop in the small triangular piazza but there was no sign of any passenger having alighted. The benches under the piazza’s dusty plane trees were unoccupied; the bar on the far side had no outside space for sitting, even if it hadn’t become suddenly cool – the pavement was mean and narrow. But a light was on inside; the steamy windows were yellow. They drove on, slowly, not wishing to draw attention to themselves, and almost immediately they were out of Sant’Anna again.

  The road that wound uphill out of the village was unlit, and a wind had got up, swaying the trees overhead. To either side of them the woodland was dense and full of movement, between dark and deeper dark and probably boar. Then there was a big old gateway half-overgrown, a bend, a smallholding set back under trees, a ramshackle house with a small lit window.

  ‘Maria Clara Martinelli’s home,’ said Pietro. ‘We can call on her on the way back, right?’ Sounding like he was trying to keep his spirits up.

  ‘Sure,’ said Sandro tightly.

  He’d never told anyone about that late afternoon with Johanna Nielsson, the sun streaming through a window upstairs in the old house and voices from downstairs as she knelt in front of him. The sound from downstairs of Baratti browbeating the Italian girl. And the panic in Sandro’s breast at all of it, banging like a bird in a chimney. Keeping it quiet all that time, and then when he brought it out like that, sitting in his stuffy car by a country road, it looked such a small thing, insignificant in this day and age. These days eight-year-old boys know what porn is.

  And yet. He had known it was wrong: whatever Pietro said, he had known it then and he knew it now. He couldn’t judge other men.

  Around a corner and there was the place itself. La Vipera. Oblique to the road, facing up the valley just as he remembered it, blind and obstinate with its back to the world. The flank set in against the hillside was half-covered with ivy now, the windows – that window, which one had it been? Afternoon sunlight seemed an impossibility; perhaps he’d imagined it – without glass, their frames rotting, some gone completely.

  He was out of the car and walking fast towards it without waiting for Pietro. From the front door the tatters of police tape fluttered in the strange wind that had picked up just at sunset, a wind apocalyptic under the reddening sky that blew Sandro’s hair up in tufts and flapped at his trouser-legs. Behind him, Pietro called something he didn’t hear.

  Sandro felt cold as he came into the deeper shadow at the door and caught a horrible whiff of decay and urine beneath the clean smell of leaves. The door, rotten at the hinges, gave easily under his hand, and he was inside.

  This. This is where it came from. As if the house was a well of darkness. Sandro knew it immediately as none of Pietro’s men could have known it. This place began a chain of events that ended with a man’s head in a dead woman’s lap in a mean little hut.

  His eyes were still unable to process the dim space he entered, yet Sandro’s brain still held its layout. A broad tiled hall, a wide staircase, kitchen to one side, salon to the other, bedrooms upstairs. Bedrooms, each with mattresses on the ground, things hanging like cobwebs, decorative things from far-off countries, cloth birds, dreamcatchers. He felt something and turned around and saw it was Pietro.

  ‘Did you do forensics in here?’ said Sandro, and Pietro hesitated.

  ‘Not really,’ he said and they both looked around at the same moment. ‘We checked it over. You might have expected it to have been used, kids or someone kipping down a night, but there wasn’t anything. No beer cans, no dirty magazines. And no obvious sign of any violence in here, no break-in.’ He cleared his throat. ‘No blood.’

  ‘You wouldn’t have had to use violence to break in, though,’ said Sandro, half to himself, the rotten wood from the front door still dusty on his fingertips. ‘And as for blood – did you do light source detection?’

  Blood showed up black under powerful UV, some other bodily fluids – semen, for example – glowed, phosphorescent. Just asking the question made Sandro uneasy – he wasn’t a police officer any longer so who was he to tell them their job, and he was so far behind the latest technologies – but Pietro was shaking his head.

  ‘Lotti was definitely killed where we found him,’ he said. ‘And we –’ he hesitated ‘– we’re pretty sure she was too. There was some animal interference and insect life with – the body – that would imply it hadn’t been inside all that time.’

  ‘I think it happened in here,’ said Sandro, without knowing that was what he was going to say but quite sure as the words came out that they were true. ‘It began here. I don’t know when, of course.’ He turned his head. ‘Maybe forty years ago.’

  Pietro opened his mouth then closed it again. ‘All right,’ he said cautiously. ‘But there was an awful lot of her blood at the scene.’ He coloured and Sandro knew he was embarrassed, thinking his partner was losing it. That this was all just a big mistake. ‘But if you –’

  Sandro held up a hand to him. ‘Look,’ he said, more brusquely than he meant, ‘do you mind if I go upstairs on my own a moment?’

  If Pietro said something – anything – about crystal balls or sixth sense, Sandro was out of there. He was uneasy enough about it himself, this sensation that had come unasked, had no idea if it was guilt or superstition. But Pietro just looked at him then pulled the bag he’d brought around his body, a flat nylon satchel, and extracted a torch. Sandro looked at it. ‘It happens to be UV,’ Pietro said, sheepish. ‘But also, it’s dark up there.’

  As Sandro pocketed the torch, Pietro took a hurried step back, away from him, to the threshold, as if he needed the air. Sandro began to climb. On the
wooden stairs as he drew up to the level of the first floor he heard something, an odd whistling, almost groaning, and paused, waiting, listening. He turned and saw that Pietro had stepped outside and the doorway stood open and empty.

  The wind. The light was strange in here, dark yet not quite dark; the odours were unusual. Sandro kept climbing. The last time he had walked up these stairs, Johanna Nielsson had been ahead of him, her narrow hips swaying in something long and tattered. He couldn’t have said he found her beautiful, even, but she had mesmerised him. Her large light eyes, her narrowness, her cracked pale lips.

  And he was on the landing, feeling the wooden ball at the top of the banister under his hand. She’d turned here, a finger to her lips. Lucia Grenzi in the kitchen with Baratti, shouting at him in Italian, porco maiale: she was in the Dolomites running a ski school now, Gorgone had said. Was it even possible that the women that had been here had dissolved back into normal lives? Martine Kaufmann turning away and walking into another room as Nielsson held her hand out to him.

  He shouldn’t have taken it.

  The wind rattled something and he could feel the breeze on his face. No glass left in these windows, loose in their frames. He wouldn’t go into that room yet.

  He stepped into the doorway opposite him. A large room with a single window in the back wall, a black square that emanated chill: a great piece of plaster hung down from the ceiling between the rafters and the room was empty, not a stick of furniture. Sandro stood a moment and let his eyes adjust to what little light there was, filtering up from the hall behind him, then closed them to set it as it was, as it had been. Back then there had been a chair, a small table and three big mattresses on the floor.

  People came and went, didn’t they? There had been visitors.