She didn’t reply: didn’t dare. She sent one to Giuli, saying, Sorry. Leave this to me now. You need to get home to Enzo.
Almost immediately the message pinged back. Ragno says they were trying to make babies at La Vipera, some kind of all-women commune, getting all the women pregnant, no need for men. Lotti came to see an old friend in the Oltrarno, just after Ferragosto. He says Nielsson wasn’t the brains of La Vipera, only the moneybags.
Tell Sandro, she typed in. Trying to work it out and failing. Began to ask what did she mean – but before she could finish the message another followed on the first’s heels.
I’m pregnant.
She stared. Stared and stared, trying to subdue the sensation, to moderate it, because it was dangerous – but it would not be moderated, like a song it rose inside her. A woman with an umbrella bumped against her with an impatient sound. Go home, daughter, she typed in, her fingers clumsy with joy. I love you. We love you.
As she sent it a little window popped up on the phone: Low Battery. She paused, considered. Replied to Sandro: Who was it you went to see in the Oltrarno? Ragno the pimp says he knew Lotti from the old days and bumped into him in the Oltrarno the weekend after Ferragosto. Said he was visiting an old friend. Her fingers hovered over the screen: she could tell him where she was going. But he’d only worry. She pressed Send.
With a stab of panic she turned it off then, stuffed it hastily away in her pocket and began to run.
The car was there. She’d almost been hoping it wouldn’t be. She climbed in and immediately was surrounded by Sandro: old leather, the smell of his skin, his hair oil. Fumbling, she found the ignition. Twenty-seven years since – but the car started. If it had been a modern car, if he’d given in to Giuli’s pressure, Pietro’s, to get himself a decent machine with air-con and a radio, she’d have been lost. But she knew this car as well as she knew Sandro: it was old-school. Found the windscreen wipers, engaged gears, hauled on the wheel – and she was out in the slow-moving traffic of the Via Romana.
Dizzy under the assault of a dozen different lights – headlights, streetlights, the glare from a shop window, the tail-light of a motorino that undertook her with a buzzing whine – dazzling in the rain, Luisa gripped the wheel for grim death until she came under the Porta Romana, across the big roundabout and reached the relative calm of the Via Senese, when she managed to sit back in the driver’s seat for the first time. Take a breath.
The traffic was heavy: rush hour. Just as well, take it slow.
Did she even know Benedetta would be there? Luca Bartolini had implied it back at the hospital, but she couldn’t trust Bartolini, she knew that now.
But it wasn’t just Benedetta that Luisa was going to see. She thought of the big old house on the hill, the dank overgrown drive, the cavernous rooms. She thought of Gianna Marte, whom she’d seen in the hospital, who knew her name; she thought of Luca Bartolini; she thought of the old woman, the Princess Salieri, who hadn’t been seen in public for months, who was gaga by all accounts. Ahead, traffic slowed to a standstill, brake lights came on in the rain. If Sandro knew where she was going, he would start by telling her she couldn’t possibly drive, it probably wasn’t even legal after all this time, did she know where her driving licence was?
Then he would ask her if she thought it was safe, driving up into the dark hills in a storm, those country roads. He would say, but why?
What do you think you can find out on your own?
Going to visit someone you suspected of murder alone, in the dark. He would ask her what question she would put to Benedetta, supposing the Salieri would leave her alone with the woman, supposing she wasn’t dosed up, supposing she was even still alive. Luisa shivered suddenly at the wheel and in the same moment a horn blared: the traffic ahead had moved. She engaged gear, barely escaped stalling, recovered momentum, put on speed. Quick. Quick.
She took the new tunnel bypass and came out at Galluzzo. A big black car cut her up on the roundabout and she braked abruptly as a profile turned briefly to examine her. Dazzled, she held a hand up, but he was gone and she was on the Siena road.
The turning to Sant’Anna took her by surprise, it came so quickly. She heard the tyres squeal a little in the wet as she took the curve and the wipers flogged back and forth. It occurred to Luisa that she didn’t know if the car was roadworthy. It had been years since Sandro had spent any money on it.
In the dark, the country road Luisa had only seen from the bus since the day of Benedetta’s wedding wound uphill, unrecognisably strange. A derelict barn loomed ominous on a sharp bend, old advertising fading on its flank, and she swerved around it. Her head ached with concentrating, in the rain, in the dark, looking out for the sign – and then there it was. She crept uphill, headlights feeble in the pitch dark, then the village appeared, small stone houses shuttered up, street lighting. The little square, trees dripping, the bar window fogged up. She crept on, because she knew the road now: this was the road she’d walked. Up ahead she saw a light a little way back, on a curve, under scrubby trees. She was going at barely fifteen miles an hour, frightened of missing the turn – and just frightened. Peering at the light, she saw it must be Martinelli’s house, which must mean – yes, it was. Luisa braked.
The pillars that marked the rear entrance to the Villa Salieri stood there to her left, gleaming greenish-white in her headlights. Peering out of the side window, Luisa gauged the road that led up between them. It was overgrown, potholed, unlit – but she didn’t want to use the main entrance. She didn’t want them to see her coming, to hear her coming – and she didn’t want to pass La Vipera. She turned the car between the pillars and began her bumpy ascent.
It was precarious and agonisingly slow: the wind buffeted the trees to either side, twigs and leaves and at one point a whole branch clattered on to the windscreen, but Luisa kept the little car creeping on steadily. The road turned steeper and the villa rose above her – at least she assumed that was what it was. A great dark wall, black against the blacker sky, no lights on – and then there was a crunch as, distracted, Luisa tilted the little car into a pothole. The wheels spun, useless, for a long, awful moment, the engine’s revving deafening in her ears before, panicked by the sound, she cut it. Luisa climbed out into the dark and the rain whipped against her face. Far off she heard thunder rolling leisurely around the great basin of the city and a sheet of lightning backlit the road ahead, showing her the way up. She pocketed the keys and began to walk.
*
Pietro was looking back towards the roundabout as he climbed out of the car into the driving rain, his face still uncertain, but when Sandro asked what was bothering him, he just said, ‘Never mind. I saw a car like yours, that’s all.’
And then the camper park’s caretaker was ambling towards him, keys chinking.
The camper was right at the back, under some overhanging plant that had stained its canopy with red splotches, shining dark as blood under the sulphur-yellow lighting.
The caretaker was a wiry little man of indeterminate age with a chin dusted with stubble. He asked for their identification and Sandro stood back as Pietro proffered his. ‘Does it happen often?’ Pietro asked him. ‘Money in an envelope?’ Then, as the man eyed him suspiciously, Pietro hurriedly said, ‘We aren’t the Finanza, mate. I don’t care two hoots about what you declare to the taxman.’
The man shrugged. ‘Often enough that I didn’t think much about it,’ he said. ‘But I declare every payment.’
‘And you didn’t see the person who left it?’ The caretaker shook his head stiffly, and Sandro watched him more closely. It never did to push them, not at this stage. ‘Have you looked inside?’
‘Of course not!’ The man was indignant. ‘I don’t poke my nose in,’ he said and took a step back, holding out the keys.
‘You’re all right with us looking?’ said Sandro carefully.
‘If the owner’s dead, like you said on the phone,’ said the man, wiping his hands on a grubby quilted waistcoat
before sticking them in his pockets, ‘then be my guest.’ He regarded them a moment, then said, ‘I’ll be in the cabin.’
There on the threshold, they hesitated: it was too narrow to admit both of them at once, and they both stepped back politely. Pietro put a hand on Sandro’s shoulder. ‘You first,’ he said, and Sandro knew he was consoling him for having had no official ID to show the caretaker. He stepped up and fitted the key in the lock.
Of course, it was dark: no more than a dim gleam from the outside lighting through the thin red curtain hanging across the camper’s bigger window.
‘Wait,’ said Sandro, because he could hear Pietro fumbling for the torch he carried with him, but he wanted this moment, this first moment, without the cacophony of signals light would bring. He smelled it. He smelled her.
Musk and dead leaves and something else, a mineral scent that brought up the hairs on the back of his neck, the smell of slow rivers, of the woods in high summer, when decay is accelerated. The scent of a body found long ago but not far from here, a child dumped in a river that had diverted the course of his life with Luisa. And then the soft sound beside him of Pietro’s sigh, a click and the thin gleam of an overhead strip light flickered on.
The eyes stared back at them. A whole wall facing them, plastered with images, some peeling and faded, some relatively new. A magpie patchwork of religion: Buddhas, Kalis, Madonnas with and without children, saints bleeding, saints tortured or beatific, saints with upturned eyes and outspread arms. The effect was grotesque, something between a teenager’s bedroom and a Neapolitan catacomb.
Pietro cleared his throat. ‘I guess she found God,’ he said. ‘Or something.’
‘Something,’ said Sandro.
He looked away. There was the usual galley kitchen and Sandro stepped into it: a tiny oven, two gas rings and a gas bottle. The smell was different in here and he knelt, took a pen from his breast pocket and flicked open the door of a small fridge. A dish of something sat under a fur of lurid mould, purple and green, but otherwise it was clean and empty. He closed the door again and saw something else. Something he couldn’t identify immediately beyond its physical properties, a scrap of thin plastic, something printed on it, a scrap that had snagged on the vinyl of the floor tile – and yet it was familiar. Gingerly he took it by a corner and looked, but his sense of Pietro behind him, breathing heavily, eager, put him off. Carefully he stowed it, with the pen, in his breast pocket and straightened.
He found himself looking into a scoured stainless steel sink at something that cleared all other thoughts instantly. He beckoned Pietro to his side and they looked down together. A large butcher’s knife almost filled the sink, on the diagonal from corner to corner. A long streak of black along the blade. They turned back into the bedroom in unison and in one stride Pietro was there. He pulled back the greying quilt.
The blood had faded to rust-brown, but the image was clear. Clearer, in fact, than it had been hitherto, when he’d seen it on the post-mortem photographs of Johanna Nielsson’s bound wrists. He put a hand up, at the memory, to his chest, a reflex he couldn’t quite explain, protective, superstitious. The curled spiral of what was not, after all, a snail but, as Luisa had said, the embryonic form of a child, drawn in smeared blood on Johanna Nielsson’s sheet. It had a face, crudely drawn, and as he stared, Sandro heard himself swallow, a painful sound: he felt his heart in his throat.
Pietro had laid the quilt back, its underside marked with the faintest mirror trace of the bloodstains, and was taking a picture with his phone as Sandro stared. Benedetta’s lost child.
And then Sandro’s phone rang. His blood drumming in his ears, he hardly recognised the sound at first. He felt as though he was underwater, or in some terrible burial chamber, and all sound, all life was far off – and then with an effort he brought himself round. Answered, and as he did so saw that there were messages waiting from Luisa.
The voice sounded old, old as the hills. It laughed creakily.
‘It is you,’ she said, a ghost voice coming down the years, and although he didn’t remember her at all, beyond the indistinct memory of a pale blonde who spoke Italian with a grating transatlantic accent, drifting almost transparent through the rooms of La Vipera, the voice was there still, rusty accented Italian.
Helen Mason. Helen Mason talking to him from Canada.
He had to leave the camper to listen to her without distraction; he had to pace between the rows of vehicles put up for the winter, resting shuttered and silent. She began by laughing at him and ended by telling him something he felt, somehow, somewhere, had been sitting at the back of his thoughts all along.
When she hung up, finally, he found himself at the end of a row looking at the silhouette of the janitor’s head in the window of his cabin, bent over a screen.
At first Sandro looked without seeing, and then he saw. Perched on a pole at the entrance to the place, half-hanging off its wire, the battered eye of an ancient camera.
*
Giovanna Scarsa, staff nurse in acute care, fixed her red hair and looked on as little Cara, twenty years her junior, made a pig’s ear of making the bed up again, before stepping forward with a sigh to tug the sheet into place.
‘I don’t know who she thinks she is,’ she said, half to herself because it would be incompatible with her dignity to share her thoughts with her junior, ‘telling us how to do our job.’ She glanced up at the CCTV in the corner. ‘Just because she was a policeman’s wife once upon a time. I happen to know she’s just a shop assistant.’
‘He was nice, though, wasn’t he?’ said Cara warily. The last thing she needed was Scarsa in a temper. ‘The brother?’
Scarsa sighed and her expression softened, just a touch. ‘Lovely man,’ she said pensively. ‘Class, you see.’
He’d thanked them courteously for their help, reserving a special twinkle for Cara, which she was fairly sure Scarsa hadn’t noticed. She tucked her dark hair under the little cap with satisfaction. There had been something odd, though. She didn’t know if the staff nurse had noticed it too – but when they’d mentioned his mother’s carer having come down to keep his sister company, a distinct shadow had passed over his face. ‘Who?’ he’d said. ‘Gianna? Are you sure?’
Being classy, of course, he hadn’t confided a thing in them, just turned a little stiffer in his gratitude.
The bed was done, and Giovanna Scarsa looked at it with satisfaction. The evening was quiet still but it was the calm before the storm. An elderly lady was on her way up from the emergency room having suffered her third heart attack. This bed would be hers, and probably her last resting place. But they wouldn’t clear her for dispatch for another half an hour and in the meantime …
‘Cara,’ she said, hesitating. The girl might be junior but two eyes were, she grudgingly admitted, better than one. ‘I don’t see how it would do any harm to look at that CCTV footage, though? Just to be on the safe side.’
It was a matter of minutes to get it up on the screen behind the nurses’ station.
They saw her, moving jerkily. Something about watching someone who thinks they are unobserved, thought Cara. The stocky little figure crept. Her body language changed in front of the nurses’ station: she stood straighter, with confidence. Scarsa had gone quite still, watching, her red hair a cloud around her face, and Cara darted a quick glance. The policeman’s wife might be just a shop assistant but she had something. The staff nurse peered closer and clicked on the camera nearest to Ticino’s bed.
Benedetta Ticino wasn’t visible, the curtains were closed around the bed, but the small figure stood outside them, poised, hovering.
Looking one way, then another. Checking for who was watching, then her head tipped back as she scanned the corners of the long corridor, looking, looking. Looking for the camera.
And then she found it and looked straight into it.
Wide northern face, blonde hair. It sat up from her face, tufted silver in the light, and she looked back at them.
&n
bsp; Chapter Twenty-Seven
ONCE SHE TOLD ENZO, Giuli knew, that would be it. Off active service, once and for all.
Sod it. She climbed on the motorino, pulling on her helmet. Why did everything suddenly feel so precarious? When she’d thought she was sick she’d felt like lead, weighed to the ground. And now she felt like thistledown, like the slightest breeze would knock her over.
Fastening the helmet’s strap, she had to acknowledge that this was more than a breeze. The wind buffeted her so that she had to brace her legs either side of the little machine to stay upright, and the street gleamed slick with rain. Her phone blipped.
Don’t come after me.
Luisa.
Well, she thought. We’ll see about that. She hesitated, then texted Sandro.
I think Luisa’s gone to Sant’Anna.
It was only after she’d pressed Send that it occurred to her that she might be wrong. Because how would she even get up there? Too late for a bus, and Luisa spending thirty, forty euros at least on a taxi? Inconceivable. But the alternative was – Giuli stood, straddling the bike, at a loss. Surely not. The thought of Luisa driving brought something like a laugh to her lips. Slowly Giuli leaned down and stuck the key in the moped’s ignition: now Luisa decides to take up driving again, she thought, in wonder. She’d stopped when she lost her own baby, and now – She stopped the thought right there, with a shiver.
Riding the motorino gingerly, as if on a tightrope, she set off, hissing through the streets and over the Ponte alla Carraia. The lights strung out along the river like diamonds, the low curve of the Ponte Santa Trinita silhouetted dark against the bright jewel-shops of the Ponte Vecchio. The world looking dangerous and beautiful and new, and her head like a balloon about to float. She pulled up in the Via del Parioncino and pressed the bell marked Concierge. When the Neapolitan opened the door in her slippers, she looked down first and, following her gaze, Giuli saw that without realising it she had put her hand over her belly.
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