‘The man she married was called Ticino.’
The Neapolitan bustled two steps forward, eager, newly respectful. ‘He calls her Benedetta, the brother, half-brother. And if I might say, madam, Mrs –?’
‘Cellini,’ said Luisa quietly. She was ashen. Giuli, newly purged of her own sickness, took an unsteady step forward and placed a hand on her arm. Luisa didn’t seem to notice. ‘Go on,’ she said to the Neapolitan.
‘She may have been living here but you wouldn’t have known it, not really. She ventured as far as Salvatore’s workshop once in a blue moon, but no further. She had some kind of condition, well – he tried to explain – nerves, you know. She’d be here and then she’d be gone again, to some –’ she checked herself ‘– some rest home. Spa, you know.’
They were losing sight of it: Giuli felt the sickness rise inside her again. ‘But what about –?’ They turned to look at her. She opened her mouth but it wouldn’t say the words. ‘I need to –’
Where was the child?
Giuli turned. She wanted to call, where are you, because for all the coffered ceilings here, for all the china and mahogany and family portraits, the air was the same air she herself had breathed as a child, in the walk-up, oily with exhaust fumes, on the roaring Via Pisana where her mother had serviced punters, the same rancid emptiness – and how many times had she wished for someone to come up those stairs and call for her? On the dirty mattress on the floor, not even room for her to hide.
‘Where are you?’ she whispered, not even sure if she’d said it out loud.
‘Giuli?’ Luisa’s voice seemed to come from far away.
She got as far as the signora’s bedroom, a small room, almost fully occupied by a four-poster bed hung with dusty brocade, pink velvet counterpane, bedside table. She fell to her knees, crouching to look under the bed, not caring what they thought of her, but there was only dust on the soft-red tiled floor, furry in the distant gleam from the sitting room. Dust – and there, rolled away back against the wall, a tube of something. Flattening herself to the floor, Giuli reached for it and sat up against the bedside cabinet. She squinted at it in the light. Glue.
A tube of glue such as children use.
She looked up at them, standing in the doorway and staring at her. She pushed herself off the bedside cabinet, which had a key that was sticking into her back, and turned.
‘You can’t –’ said the concierge, starting forwards, but Giuli paid no attention.
Inside the cabinet was a scrapbook. Faded cover. This was old. If this had been a child’s scrapbook, it was from years and years ago. Giuli opened it and stared, and Luisa’s voice, gentle, pleading with her, became part of the hum filling her ears.
Chapter Twenty-Two
THERE WAS A SMALL BAR at the end of the street, three steps down from street level, and with her instinct for these things – for places of safety, or at least relative safety – Luisa led Giuli there.
The scrapbook, wrapped in a clean tea-towel extracted from Benedetta’s kitchen drawer – not only clean, but ironed: there must, Luisa had thought irrelevantly as she extracted it, be a small army of cleaners and laundries keeping Benedetta housed and hygienic – was in Luisa’s tote bag.
There in Benedetta’s strange, small, crowded bedroom, she had gone straight to Giuli’s side. The scrapbook open on her lap, cuttings from the eighties: a royal baby from Britain on one side; on the other, I lost my little angel was the headline beside a baby’s closed eyes, the face in tight swaddling. Luisa had swallowed. Giuli had turned a page, another. Involuntarily, Luisa had looked away.
Her glance had fallen into the bedside cabinet, its door still open. There was something else in there. A little worn notebook, leather, with BT stamped on it in gold. Benedetta Ticino.
‘Look,’ the concierge had said to Giuli, ‘that’s madam’s private things.’ Giuli and Luisa had looked back up at her and the woman had faltered.
‘Could you get a glass of water, please?’ Luisa had said with as much authority as she could muster. ‘Can’t you see she’s not well?’ And gently taking the book from Giuli, manoeuvring herself between her and the cabinet, she saw them turn away. Reaching behind her with a free hand, she slipped the little leather book into her pocket.
In the kitchen, Luisa addressed herself to Salvatore.
‘I need to get this to the police,’ she said, and the concierge started back with a small gasp as if burned. Salvatore’s eyes merely narrowed, and he conceded a wary nod. Neither of them had more than glimpsed the contents of the scrapbook, but they had seen enough. ‘I’ll take it to Sandro,’ she said. Salvatore and the woman had conferred, inaudibly: she knew what they’d be saying, though. Neither of them had any enthusiasm for going to the police.
‘We’ll say we were looking for the child,’ Luisa said, coaxing. ‘And we were, weren’t we? How could you get into trouble for that? For caring about a child in distress?’
Salvatore and the Neapolitan exchanged glances and he said, ‘All right. As long as you make sure they know it was about the child.’
The scrapbook lay between them on the kitchen table. It was closed, but that made no difference. They’d all seen it. The last five pages were crammed full, glue daubed here, there and everywhere. And all the cuttings referred to the bodies found in Sant’Anna.
Luisa grilled the two of them as to Benedetta’s whereabouts the previous week. It seemed only wise. The cobbler had last seen her weeks earlier, when she had dropped her shoes off for mending.
‘I told her,’ he said, nodding towards Giuli.
‘The half-brother came for her,’ said the concierge. ‘Third week of August.’ She darted an uneasy glance at Salvatore, then at Giuli, then finally at Luisa. ‘He took her to the place, a nursing home they call it, but it’s for drunks, addicts. She was there two weeks, and they don’t let them go, you know, once they’re in. They have security.’ Nodding, looking around at her audience. ‘He brought her back, three, four days ago.’
‘Just after the bodies were found,’ murmured Giuli, and Salvatore shot her a startled glance, but the concierge didn’t seem to hear.
‘How did she seem?’ said Luisa.
The woman shrugged. ‘She seemed – steady.’
‘But she wasn’t always steady,’ said Luisa, ‘was she?’
‘She was all right when I got here, a couple of years ago. They seemed to keep her on an even keel between them – he’d visit, her brother, and then the woman would – what with massage and churchgoing and that. Treatments. She hadn’t had a turn in a while, but then this summer …’
‘About a month ago,’ said Luisa. And they both nodded. ‘And then again two days ago,’ said Luisa. ‘The night after she got back.’ Bartolini, when she saw him in Sant’Anna, must have just got back too. Hadn’t he said something about having been away with his sister?
Benedetta had come back here, sat here sticking in those cuttings, writing the dates – and swallowed a bottle of pills.
‘I had to call them, of course, and the ambulance.’
‘Them?’
‘The brother. I’ve about had enough. She’s not allowed sharp knives, you know.’
‘She’s a danger to herself? Or –?’ Luisa broke off.
Benedetta couldn’t have killed Lotti. She’d been in the rest home, under close watch, and her brother too. And the idea of Benedetta killing anyone gave Luisa pause. So frail, paper thin – but something inside her kept going, didn’t it? It’s the weak that kill: Sandro had said that to her long ago.
She couldn’t have killed Lotti – but she could have killed Johanna Nielsson.
‘The housekeeper, Gianna Marte?’ said Luisa, almost to herself. ‘Did she visit her at the hospital, do you know?’
‘I don’t know, do I? I don’t know what she is or what her name is, for that matter – she just lets herself in. Do-gooding foreigner, religious nut, those moony eyes. She wasn’t with him. She comes separately.’
‘And what ab
out friends? Her brother said –?’
The concierge shook her head. ‘No friends I know of,’ she said. ‘Except you, of course.’
‘Me,’ murmured Luisa. She sat back.
At the bar she ordered Giuli a camomile tea. A tea-towel. She could imagine Sandro’s eyes rolling to heaven at the thought, the contamination of evidence. Sandro, Sandro, Sandro. She got out her phone, which told her there was no signal down here.
Hands in her lap, Giuli hadn’t moved. She was staring at something invisible. Carefully Luisa carried the glass beaker of yellow camomile to her. The smell reminded her of her own childhood. Surreptitiously she spooned some sugar into it and pushed it to Giuli, who gave a small, unhappy start and looked up into Luisa’s face.
‘The child …’
‘You know,’ said Luisa, ‘that there was no child – at least, no living, breathing four-year-old – to be rescued?’
Giuli looked at her a long moment, then nodded. ‘I’ve heard of that kind of thing. I think I read in a magazine –’
‘I don’t really understand it,’ said Luisa, ‘but, oh, ten years ago, maybe less, Sandro told me about a – a woman they interviewed who did that. Who spoke in other people’s voices. Perhaps, for example, a child’s voice – and her grandmother’s? Multiple personality disorder, something like that. It can be due to trauma. Or schizophrenia, I think –’ She checked herself. ‘God knows, I’m no expert, but it seems to me if Benedetta lost a child herself …’ And again she fell silent.
The first pages of the scrapbook had been photographs of film stars, women and dresses, cut from magazines. No more than four or five pages like that, the heads cut out carefully but with the hand of a child. And then there had been some boys, sweet-faced pop idols. A page or two of close-packed handwriting, mostly complaints about her mother, worship of her father, the usual. The usual. After that had come the baby pictures.
All sorts of babies, black, white, fat, curly haired, dark, pale. Cuttings of babies stolen and recovered, the headlines telling it all. Reunited after twenty years, They stole my baby, Deranged babysnatcher jailed. And dead babies. Little angels, gone to heaven. Handwritten dates above them. Sometimes every day for a week, sometimes months between cuttings.
The last pages – four of them – had the fresh cuttings glued in. From several different newspapers, La Nazione, the Corriere, Repubblica.
Giuli was staring down at her phone, flat on the table. Luisa pushed the chamomile towards her gently. ‘Drink it,’ said Luisa, settling herself beside her. Giuli looked up again, and it was as if Luisa had hardly seen her for the past however long it was, as if she didn’t quite recognise her Giuli, the daughter she’d never had. Her face was thin and pale; there were new lines to either side of her mouth; her lip trembled. Giuli wasn’t a child: she was forty-five. Soon she would be old.
‘There’s something funny about all this,’ Luisa said. ‘I’d like to talk to this Gianna Marte. What about the friend Bartolini said she’d made? Or is it –’ she paused, as the knots drew tighter ‘– the same person?’
Giuli didn’t seem to be listening.
Remembering, Luisa felt in her pocket and extracted the little notebook. The leather was worn but of good quality. She opened it. Her first feeling was one of disappointment because it wasn’t a notebook: it was an address book, the gilt-edged pages soft with age. She leafed through it: there weren’t many names in it, and almost all the writing was browned with age. At least half the names were crossed out – some of them she recognised as old friends of the princess’s long since dead. What? she murmured to herself, because there was something not quite right.
‘There’s something I haven’t –’ Luisa turned, not sure what she’d heard, Giuli’s voice was so quiet, and saw Giuli looking at her. Her eyes looked huge and dark.
‘Giuli?’ She dropped the notebook and reached for her hand. ‘What’s wrong, darling, please?’
And then Giuli’s phone buzzed, jiggling on the table between them, and as Luisa saw ‘number withheld’, no name on the screen, Giuli snatched it up and in the same movement rose to her feet, the colour draining from her face. ‘Hello,’ she stammered into it. ‘Hello, I –’ lifting her free hand to her ear to block the sound and grimacing, turning away from Luisa’s concerned gaze. And then she stopped. Turned back.
‘You,’ Luisa heard her say. The colour was returning to her face. ‘No – it’s no – don’t – I was expecting someone else, that’s all.’ She turned, paced away from Luisa, turned again. ‘I can’t – the signal’s so bad –’ and was walking away again, to the little bar’s door and the two steps up into the street. Luisa snatched the tote from the table, and the little address book, and followed her.
Out in the Via del Parione Giuli was hanging up. ‘I’ve arranged to meet him in the office,’ she said.
As Luisa handed her her bag and coat, there was a rumble from overhead, and they both looked up to see cloud shifting, darkening in the strip of sky over the narrow street. ‘Who?’ said Luisa, managing to be patient now that Giuli’s colour was back. ‘And who were you expecting?’
‘He’s called Ragno,’ said Giuli. ‘He’s a – I bumped into him a couple of days ago, he’s – from the old days.’ Her neck reddened. ‘When I was a kid, when mum – he worked the Via Senese.’
‘You mean –?’ said Luisa and Giuli nodded. A pimp. Her mother’s pimp.
‘I asked him about La Vipera,’ said Giuli, holding her gaze. Luisa took her hand, felt how cold it was, as she went on talking, oblivious. ‘He said he had something to tell me. I’m going to meet him at the office.’
‘Right,’ said Luisa, releasing her, then agitatedly pulling on her coat and searching for her umbrella. ‘I’m coming with you.’
At the corner, Giuli stopped. ‘What had she done?’ she said abruptly.
‘Sorry?’ said Luisa.
‘What had the woman done, with multiple personality disorder, the one Sandro interviewed?’
Luisa opened her mouth, closed it, opened it again. ‘She’d killed someone,’ she said stiffly. Cleared her throat. ‘As I remember it, she stabbed her mother twenty-six times.’ And for a moment they stood there on the busy corner of the Via dei Serragli and the Borgo Santa Monaca as the lights changed and a bus thundered by, trailing cars in its wake.
Giuli put a hand on Luisa’s arm. ‘There’s something I haven’t told you,’ she said.
A soft, ominous rain had begun to fall.
Chapter Twenty-Three
THE SKY HAD LOWERED VISIBLY, cloud drifting up the valley to settle. The light faded quickly in the mountains, those airy peaks taller than you thought when it came to sunset. One minute the grass sparkled, the stones were bathed in rosy light, the next it was all grey.
As he hung up on Gorgone, Sandro saw a missed call from Giuli and sighed.
‘So it was Benedetta Salieri.’ Pietro had his hands jammed in his pockets like a schoolboy, staring gloomily out into the twilight. ‘Bloody hell,’ he went on, ‘the three of them here. You think that’s a coincidence?’
‘Nope,’ said Sandro succinctly. He set a hand on Pietro’s shoulder and turned away from the view. Inside the hotel was warm, and the lighting changed expensively, as if by magic. Beyond reception, the bar they hadn’t noticed became visible, lights twinkling on tables, bottles glowing on glass shelves.
‘No harm in sitting down in there a minute,’ said Sandro wearily, ‘is there?’ They chose a table by the window. Outside the dusk was turning velvety. Although the insulated glass meant no sound reached them, some spotlights had come on, revealing some large shrubs agitated by what looked like a rising wind.
The place was deserted, although the chink and clatter of a dishwasher being unloaded came from beyond a door behind the bar.
‘So not a coincidence?’ Pietro was impatient, drumming his heels below the table like Ceri.
‘Well,’ Sandro spoke slowly, ‘it doesn’t sound as though Lucia Grenzi was expecting to see Ben
edetta or Nielsson. Or that Benedetta was expecting to see Nielsson. I think Gorgone, in his dimwitted way, sent Benedetta here just wanting to get her as far away as possible, out of his hair, not thinking Johanna Nielsson might come this way to find Lucia Grenzi. Had Nielsson heard about the ski school, perhaps from Kaufmann in Liguria, and called ahead to find out she’d come here? I imagine something like that. I think she came here to talk to Grenzi.’ Sandro paused. ‘We don’t, of course, know if she did that.’
Pietro nodded. ‘Gorgone – what did he say? That she had told him she was “doing the rounds”?’
‘We don’t know why, what prompted this little road trip. But it looks like that’s what it was. She’d bumped into Kaufmann up north already; she’d contacted Gorgone but he ran away rather than see her. Next would be Grenzi.’
‘And the call, the telephone call from a public phone here?’
Sandro nodded. ‘I think that would have been Johanna Nielsson. I think Lotti was next on her list. She told him she was coming to see him, too.’
‘He killed her!’ Pietro burst out. ‘He killed her after all.’
Sandro sighed. ‘Do you know, I really wish he had. I really do.’
Pietro subsided. ‘What then?’
‘I think Nielsson never saw Lotti. I think she told Lotti she was coming, but she never arrived. Who knows what else she said to him. And when she didn’t turn up, when she was killed, might Lotti perhaps wonder where she had got to and what might have happened to her – and who might have wanted her out of the way? Perhaps he told that person, or perhaps he spoke to someone else who told that person.’
Pietro sat back in the little velvet seat abruptly. ‘It’s like Chinese whispers,’ he said gloomily. ‘That place. Sant’Anna. Like a bloody relay race – you take this, I’ll take that, you run this way, I’ll run that way. You can’t pin anything on any of them.’
Sandro stared at him. Relay race, he thought. One kills the first, another kills the second. Co-operative effort. Now that made sense.
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