The Viper

by Christobel Kent

  There wasn’t a hint of plumpness about Benedetta now, the stony face on the pillow, so light she barely made a dent. Her hair that had been so thick the pearl pins kept falling out of it was carefully cut but thin and brittle, and her cheeks were hollow.

  Luisa stole closer and put out a hand to touch Benedetta’s, lying brown and thin against the snowy cotton. It was cool – cold even – and it didn’t react. She looked around the bed, at the machines there, but none of the illuminated numbers made sense to her. She folded her fingers around Benedetta’s, squeezed, and still there was nothing; she turned the hand over, the soft wrinkled palm, manicured nails. She had been well cared for, a life, Luisa imagined, of indolence, rest retreats and nurses. She found herself stroking Benedetta’s hand, looking down at it as if she might in fact be able to read a life in that palm. Then something stopped her.

  She’d taken it for a vein, a scratch on the inside of her wrist, something to do with a medical procedure, perhaps, but it wasn’t that: it was older. Two blue lines, turned fuzzy, the beginnings of a curve that called something to mind – and then there was the tiniest sound, less than a sigh, the merest softest exhalation, and with it a high distant alarm from somewhere behind her at the nurses’ station. Running footsteps in soft-soled rubber clogs.

  Luisa was on her own feet when they arrived. She’d dropped Benedetta’s hand and had stepped back in panic against the window sill. They didn’t pay her any attention initially, too busy lowering the bedhead, one skinny dark nurse taking her pulse, another, a redhead, tugging at a drip stand Luisa hadn’t noticed, a plastic tube dangling from it, and then the redhead frowning, looking round and seeing Luisa.

  ‘Is she going to be all right?’ said Luisa, breathless, desperate, realising too late that it sounded like an admission of something.

  ‘Madam?’ starting almost polite, with a gruff edge. ‘Who let you in here?’ Angrier. Behind her the other nurse had her ear to Benedetta’s mouth, listening for breathing. She breathed, Luisa wanted to say, I heard her breathe.

  ‘Who the hell are you?’ said the redhead angrily and then, lifting the dangling tube, ‘Have you done this?’

  But all Luisa could hear was that breath, that soft, despairing exhalation that sounded like nothing so much as an end.

  *

  They didn’t get their coffee till they were past Mantova, in the end.

  Even in Pietro’s big Alfa, with its heated seats and cream leather, it was a slog up the motorway to Trentino, three hours of wooded hillsides giving way to orchards, then the featureless plain, the miles and miles of capannoni, light industrial units, pig barns, and by Mantova they’d both had enough.

  Sandro hadn’t wanted to be here. He’d wanted to be tracking Luca Bartolini down. He might not have been around forty years ago, he might not have been around all summer – but there’d been something in Luisa’s voice when she’d mentioned him. Too casual. That family. Was this a man’s crime? Not Gorgone’s, that was for sure, and Bartolini was the only other man on their list.

  But then Pietro – returning Parini’s call as they’d walked in the cool morning away from San Frediano and Lotti’s grim cousin – had stopped, stock still, with the mobile to one ear and a hand to the other, at the foot of the Ponte alla Carraia. ‘What?’ he’d said, scowling into the mobile. ‘She what?’

  Sandro could only watch and wonder as he got Pietro’s half of the conversation. ‘When? Did she – was there any note? Any explanation?’ Pietro grimaced at him.

  ‘She’s dead,’ said Sandro, not waiting to be told, as Pietro hung up. ‘Lucia Grenzi’s dead.’

  ‘It came through this morning,’ said Pietro. ‘They finally tracked her down. I can’t understand why it took so long –’ He let out a long breath. ‘Except the lads started with the foreign ones. She hung herself. A little more than a month ago. Parini said he’d email me the report but –’ he made an explosive sound of frustration ‘– this city! The signal’s so bad. We’ll need to call in at the station.’

  He turned around and around in the narrow street, looking for somewhere open, then marched, Sandro in his wake, until they got to the bridge. Below them the river was all gold and green in the September light.

  ‘A month ago,’ Sandro repeated. ‘More than a month or less?’

  ‘Five weeks,’ said Pietro. ‘In a luxury hotel, one of those fat farm places, up in the mountains.’

  A silence. Pietro looking at Sandro, beginning to shake his head. ‘No,’ he said.

  Hung herself in a hotel. The girl, the small, dark Italian girl, feisty: talking back angrily to Baratti. Not too feisty to be Nielsson’s slave, beetle-browed, dogged, like she was her bodyguard – and a better one than Gorgone, mooching around trying to look like Jim Morrison. Why had it taken the news of her death to bring that back to Sandro? The little terrier who’d made a life for herself with the ski school, who’d grown old. And suddenly, now?

  ‘A couple of hours’ drive,’ said Sandro.

  ‘Less in my car,’ said Pietro. Silence. ‘Come on, be sensible. You haven’t even got air conditioning.’

  They’d called in at the station on the way. Parini and Panayotis were there. There was a tray with empty coffee cups, sticky dregs. Panayotis handed Pietro the coroner’s report on Grenzi’s death. ‘There’s a couple of things –’

  But Sandro interrupted him sharply. ‘They’re sure it’s suicide?’ Pietro was busy scanning the pages.

  Panayotis answered, ‘They’re sure. She left a note. She was in a hotel, drank the contents of the mini-bar then hung herself. She locked the door, left the note, her handwriting. There was no suspicion at all of foul play.’

  Pietro looked up. ‘Up there in the Dolomites, they’re a thorough bunch,’ he said. ‘Look, call ahead, will you?’ Addressing Panayotis. ‘Let them know we’re coming and why. And text me names. Manager, whatever.’

  ‘Hold up,’ said Parini, bouncing on the balls of his feet like a kid, practically putting his hand up for permission to speak.

  ‘Yes?’ said Pietro wearily. Sandro could kiss him, sometimes: he’d always thought of him as a little brother but now he was the grown-up in the room.

  ‘Right,’ said Parini, pleased, ‘first off, we got Lotti’s phone records.’

  Sandro’s mind was blank for a second, and then he remembered. The little stone house, clean and cold as a butcher’s shop, and Lotti’s old-fashioned phone, his pride and joy. One of only three in the village, all that time ago.

  ‘And?’ said Pietro.

  ‘Easy,’ Parini said. ‘Seven calls in the last three months, all incoming, six of them from call centres. Cold sales. And then five weeks ago there was one from a public phone booth in Trentino that lasted four minutes.’

  ‘Trentino,’ said Pietro and reached for his jacket – they were both halfway to the door but Parini was after them.

  ‘No,’ he said, ‘no, there was something else.’ Looking past him Sandro saw a name, ringed in red, on the whiteboard. ‘Davide – officer Ceri – took a call late last night. About ten.’ And Parini said the name as Sandro looked at it. ‘From Helen Mason, the woman in Canada.’

  ‘Nova Scotia,’ said Pietro, impatient. ‘What did she say? Where’s Ceri now?’

  ‘Gone out for more coffees,’ said Parini. ‘But she said she’d only speak to’ – he glanced at Sandro – ‘Mr Cellini. She said something about the community being very strict and she can use the phone only between three and four in the afternoon their time. Davide gave your mobile number but she got distressed, said she wasn’t sure if she was allowed to call a mobile. Davide said he wasn’t sure if she was dealing from a full deck. Then she hung up.’ And Parini let out a breath.

  ‘Shit,’ said Sandro. ‘Give me the number. Shit.’ They were all looking at him.

  Pietro was on his mobile, looking up a route. ‘It says three hours.’

  ‘Come on, chief,’ said Parini. ‘You can do it in two.’

  The ring road was crowded, r
oadworks everywhere, the new Palazzo di Giustizia rising out of the chaos to the north like a monstrous machine that had forced its way up from some underground metropolis. Sandro spent the time composing a careful message to Luisa, abasing himself, and thinking they might as well have been in his grubby little Fiat if they were going to creep along at two miles an hour.

  Staring out of the window at the monstrosity, Sandro dialled the number in Nova Scotia Parini had given him. It rang and rang: he hung up.

  Pietro’s mobile, sitting in its holder giving them directions, rang as they emerged from a tunnel around Bologna into low grey cloud. It was on speaker phone, and Parini’s excitable voice said, ‘Boss? Boss?’ His gingery face appeared on the small screen, eager. These kids, thought Sandro, and their technology. Young officers never seemed to bother with landlines.

  ‘I’m driving,’ said Pietro. ‘Talk to Officer Cellini, will you?’

  ‘Sandro will do,’ said Sandro drily. Around them the hills were shrouded in mist, a ghostly landscape. ‘What is it, Parini?’

  ‘Update on the vehicle trace,’ said Parini, ‘the camper? I just took a call from traffic.’ Sandro detected suppressed excitement. ‘Some more info came in from a ZTL camera, at San Marco.’ A pause, then getting only impatience, the boy hurried on. ‘The camper was caught there coming in to the city a little over a month ago, August 12th. Into Florence from the north, entering the ZTL illegally.’ He paused, triumphant. ‘She can’t have been in the city for a hundred years,’ he said, ‘not to know she’d get a ticket, even in August.’ Then flushed.

  ‘Or she didn’t give a damn,’ said Sandro. ‘You don’t know Johanna Nielsson. Is there an image? Can you send it?’

  Parini’s head bobbed down, looking at a screen, then up again. ‘Will do.’

  ‘Cazzo,’ said Pietro, risking a glance away from the road down at Parini’s eager face. ‘In August there’s campers everywhere. And most of those ZTL cameras only record entry not exit. I don’t suppose …?’

  ‘As a matter of fact,’ Parini turned pink again, ‘there was another sighting. Once I knew we were talking Florence I requested another search in the immediate city environs for the days after that sighting.’ A breath. ‘A week later tollbooth cameras caught the licence plate, a rear image only, on the southern junction, where the Siena road meets the ring road, that big roundabout re-entering the city –’

  ‘Yes, yes,’ said Pietro, impatient, his eyes darting from the road to the mobile screen and back.

  ‘Hold on,’ said Sandro. ‘What date are we talking now?’

  ‘August 16th,’ said Parini.

  ‘The day after Ferragosto,’ said Pietro. ‘The city would have been dead.’

  For a moment Sandro felt as though his brain had frozen. ‘A month ago, though?’ he said. ‘Didn’t the pathologist say – hold on.’

  Silence. Pietro’s hands white on the wheel. ‘This time there was no driver image?’ said Pietro.

  ‘Where’s the – where’s the –?’ Sandro had the iPad open on his knee. ‘Where’s the pathology report?’ Stabbing at the screen in frustration. And then it appeared, in black and white. ‘Death estimated approximately four weeks before the discovery of the body on September 13th.’

  ‘So,’ said Pietro, frowning, ‘she would have to have been killed almost the moment she arrived in Sant’Anna?’

  ‘Or –’ They all reached the conclusion at the same time, but it was Panayotis who said it, his dark-browed face appearing in the screen over Parini’s shoulder.

  ‘Or she was already dead.’

  ‘Panayotis?’ said Sandro.

  ‘Yes, boss?’ said the kid, and Sandro barely even registered the word.

  ‘Find that camper-van, will you?’

  Chapter Seventeen

  AT THE MANTOVA AUTOGRILL they fought their way to the bar. Even though it was past midday they ordered the breakfast special: cappuccino, orange juice, bun.

  The place was packed, five deep at the bar, so while Pietro queued Sandro got himself a napkin and extracted a sugardusted bun for each of them from the glass-fronted cabinet on the bar. After five wearisome minutes they were reunited in a cramped corner of the big service station, by the window. Sandro got out the iPad, sheepish – he never thought he’d be one of those: a busy executive on his screen in public.

  In the first picture, the camper coming into the city to the north, you could see her face, indistinct but recognisable. A white oval, the long grey hair. You could even see the rings on her hands, on the wheel. As he looked, Sandro was so silent Pietro had to nudge him.

  ‘All right?’

  ‘It’s her,’ was all Sandro could find to say. His mouth was dry: he took a gulp of orange juice, like medicine.

  There was moving footage of the car’s exit. The fuzzy pictures of the rear quarter of an elderly camper-van inching its way jerkily round the big roundabout to the south of the city, exiting to the Siena superstrada. But no matter how much they enhanced the images they could get nothing on the driver, not a profile, not an eyebrow, not a pinky finger on the wheel.

  ‘Leaving the city to the south,’ said Pietro.

  ‘To Sant’Anna,’ said Sandro.

  Pietro shrugged. ‘Where else?’ He chewed his lip. ‘Lotti would have still been alive,’ he said. ‘What if – I wonder –?’

  ‘Where would you hide a camper,’ said Sandro, musing on his own track, ‘where it would be invisible? On a site you’d have to register.’

  ‘Sandro?’

  With an effort Sandro transferred his attention to Pietro. ‘Yes?’

  ‘What if it did go down to Sant’Anna and Lotti saw whoever was driving it? If Johanna Nielsson was already dead, the driver would have to be –’

  ‘The killer,’ supplied Sandro. ‘I think … I think you’re on the right track. At least, I think Lotti died because he knew Nielsson’s killer. Once you’re sure – and the pathologist was very sure – that he didn’t kill her and then kill himself.’ There was a silence. ‘I’d like to find that camper,’ said Sandro. They both picked up their teaspoons in the same moment to scoop the last of the cappuccino.

  ‘I’d like to know what Grenzi said to Lotti on the phone,’ said Pietro. ‘That call from the phone box in Trentino.’

  ‘If it was her,’ said Sandro, cautious.

  Pietro shrugged. ‘If it was her,’ he said. They were both anxious, twitchy. Wanting to be in two places at once.

  ‘As for the camper,’ Pietro began, reading Sandro’s mind, seeing Sant’Anna there, seeing the faceless killer at the wheel, ‘I think Panayotis is really good. The other two are less … steady. But if it can be found, he’ll find it. We’re going north, I think your instincts – our instincts – are right on this. ’

  Sandro sighed, extracting the coroner’s report on Grenzi. ‘So,’ he said. ‘They’re sure it was suicide but they don’t have a motive.’

  Taking a bite, Pietro spoke around his bun indistinctly. ‘She wasn’t at the spa for medical reasons, but for a holiday. She was seventy-one years old. No illness, terminal or otherwise, no depression, or at least not diagnosed.’ Pietro brushed at himself in exasperation where the icing sugar had found its way to the front of his sweater. ‘The note didn’t really say why she’d done it, just that she was sorry for the maid or whoever found her body but she didn’t know how else to do it.’

  ‘No traumatic break-up?’

  ‘No partner at all, according to the man she had running the ski school.’

  Sandro held out his hand for the report and looked down at the photograph of the note attached to the email. Beautiful handwriting, was his first thought. Neat and firm, which indicated she probably wrote it before she worked her way through the mini-bar. He had only had one bite of his bun and didn’t really want another. He set it down on the counter. ‘“I can’t go on with this,” it says.’

  ‘That’s sort of standard suicide note, though,’ said Pietro, peering down at it.

  ‘Yes,’ s
aid Sandro slowly. ‘And this note is just for the maid, isn’t it? I don’t know if people bother to explain themselves to the maid. I wonder if she said anything to anyone else.’

  ‘She didn’t seem to have anyone, did she?’ said Pietro. He had finished his bun and was wiping his fingers fastidiously. He drained his coffee cup and turned to look out at the pale light of the plains through the Autogrill’s window. A truck hurtled past on the motorway heading north and just beyond the petrol pumps a small family was having a picnic on a patch of mangy grass.

  Pietro spoke. ‘She told the man who managed her ski school – sounds like she was more or less retired from it – that she was going to this place to recharge her batteries. He told the coroner she seemed very cheerful when she left.’

  ‘The ski school’s only twenty miles from the spa,’ said Sandro absently. ‘We can go and ask the guy while we’re at it, can’t we?’ He looked down at the email again, the small neat writing.

  There were other photographs attached to the report. Sandro tapped on the first one and took off his glasses abruptly: he had seen suicide by hanging and he quite suddenly did not want to see a picture of this one. Grenzi’s body in situ, hanging from the back of a wardrobe. The next was a set of post-mortem shots, the body on the high hard bed from various angles, the skin discoloured against white sheets. Carefully he set the pages down on the counter of the Autogrill.

  He found himself thinking again of that room above the ring road, the three young officers gazing in wonder at him and Pietro. He’d missed that, having back-up.

  As they walked back out to the car, Sandro’s phone rang. It was Davide Ceri from the station. He stopped, and Pietro did too.

  ‘Has he found the camper?’ said Sandro. ‘Panayotis?’ Then almost immediately had to shake his head no, at Pietro. Ceri was calling about the Canadian, Helen Mason.

  ‘I’ll fill her up,’ mouthed Pietro, clicking to open the big black car. Sandro watched it glide towards the petrol pumps and slowly he followed.