But Luisa was gone. Out of the door and into the dark and gone.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
THEY PEERED IN through the glass, but the long studio space was dark. San Niccolo was buzzing. The bar over the road had spilled out into the street despite the weather.
‘Shit,’ said Sandro, ‘shit, shit, shit.’ There was no sign of Martine Kaufmann.
The wiry little caretaker of the camper park had started out by saying he thought the camera didn’t work, hadn’t worked for years, but they’d just stood there, impassive. ‘We understand about privacy and all that – but this is a murder investigation,’ said Pietro. They kept having to say that.
The man had stared at them stonily, and then abruptly gave in. ‘Help yourselves,’ he said, shoving the ancient computer screen towards them in his Portakabin. He located the August footage quite effortlessly, without explanation, his seamed old fingers surprisingly agile on the keyboard. No doubt a lot of surfing went on while he sat there with his electric heater.
And there they were. There she was.
Had Sandro known, even before the footage came up? The down-lit camper park half-empty in August, the camper bouncing slowly across the potholed waste ground to the furthest, darkest corner under the overgrown fence, and then the figures emerging, walking along the edge, one holding the other’s hand as though to keep her under control.
Nielsson’s camper-van, but neither of the women was Nielsson. Nielsson was dead.
Sandro had just come off the phone to Helen Mason, down the crackling line from Canada. She had meandered, querulous. ‘Should I begin at the beginning?’ And then had proceeded to jump forwards and backwards, tying herself in knots, making excuses, until she came to it, at last. It was her fault. It had begun with her, Johanna Nielsson’s search for forgiveness: she’d gone out to Canada and found Helen Mason.
The voice rambled on, self-justifying. In the background chanting rose and fell.
‘We were young, we didn’t know what we were doing. It isn’t as if we – it was only sex. And it isn’t as if we aborted the child ourselves, is it? Leave it to the upper classes to do that.’ Bitterness hiding under self-righteousness, a mess of excuses and spite – it didn’t sound to Sandro as though Helen Mason had found peace. He didn’t trust himself to say anything. ‘I suppose,’ grudgingly, ‘the Salieri girl wasn’t really into the sex.’
Rape, thought Sandro. That’s what we call it. Rape.
‘And after all,’ she meandered on, ‘we were punished, weren’t we? In the end there were no children. Not one of us had a child.’
He didn’t know how long he had to let her go on like this in the hope of finding anything concrete. It was quite possible her allotted telephone time would expire before he did. He had been about to give up hope when he heard it: Helen Mason drawing a wheezing, portentous breath. ‘In the end, though, when Johanna came to ask me was she to blame, I told her she need not feel guilty. Should the fly feel guilty for catching the fish? She was just the bait.’
‘Bait?’ He was quick.
‘None of it was her idea. She just smiled and went along with it. She was … amoral, at worst. The other one was behind it all. She was the consigliere, the purser, the strategist. Her. Her.’ An edge of panic to the voice now, of fear.
‘Who?’ said Sandro, holding his breath.
And she had answered, ‘Martine,’ with a hint of impatience, ‘Martine Kaufmann.’
He had hung up and told Pietro. ‘Benedetta Salieri got pregnant by Lotti or by Gorgone or by one of the men who dropped in. They had a plan to found a commune, just women, the men only for impregnation purposes. The one who got pregnant, though, was Benedetta Salieri, only along for the ride as cover for her dad and barely of legal age.’ He took a breath. ‘So the anonymous call back then wasn’t so far off the mark.’
‘And the child?’ Pietro had been ashen in the car park’s sodium lighting. ‘Those remains we found in the chimney breast?’
Sandro nodded. ‘She lost the child. Helen Mason got all vague on how. But it happened in La Vipera.’
And Pietro whistled shakily. ‘Well, that’s a motive,’ he said. ‘Even forty years later, that’s a motive.’
And they went inside. Into the caretaker’s Portakabin where the fuzzy film played out the camper’s arrival in the park, and two figures emerged. They moved in the shadows and then, just as they reached the bumpy ramp that would have led them out into the Via Senese and out of shot, the slighter figure, so slight she might have been a child, made as if to dart away, pulling out of the other’s grip. Was that Benedetta Salieri? Frail, the barman at La Serenita had said, or fragile. Yes. Yes.
And the woman cajoling her along was Martine Kaufmann.
‘So what the hell –?’ said Pietro straining to see. ‘You mean both of them –?’ But the caretaker had abruptly lost patience then, moving to switch the machine off, telling them it was the middle of the night and if they wanted to waste any more of his time he’d see them in the morning with a warrant.
They got to San Niccolo in seven minutes in the Alfa.
‘Giuli said someone saw Lotti out here in San Niccolo, “visiting an old friend”,’ said Sandro.
‘Let me guess,’ said Pietro. ‘Martine Kaufmann.’
‘I don’t understand, though,’ said Pietro as they peered through the darkened window of the studio. ‘Was Kaufmann trying to protect her?’
‘Luca Bartolini told Luisa his sister had made friends,’ said Sandro. ‘What if that was one friend, and that friend was Martine Kaufmann? Kaufmann trying to make up for what they’d done to her, what La Vipera had done to her.’
It was a theory. Pietro was nodding, uncertain. ‘So Kaufmann went along with Benedetta to visit Sant’Anna with Nielsson. So they could all – what? Find closure? Only something happened.’
‘Something certainly happened,’ said Sandro slowly. ‘They came back alone, didn’t they?’
And now Sandro cupped his hand around his eyes, looking in to the long studio space, looking for something he remembered, and saw the shelf of pottery – yes. Yes. Hand-painted mugs and vases and – teapots. Just like the one Lotti had given Gianna Marte, his love gift. His eyes ranged across the dark interior, the vaulted ceiling, the crowded walls, the desk – and down.
‘Lotti had come here to the studio to find Kaufmann,’ he said to Pietro as he looked, ‘to tell her Nielsson was on her way, hadn’t turned up yet. Maybe he was trying to cause trouble, or maybe he wanted money. She fobbed him off with a teapot for his lady friend. But from that day on, his days were numbered, weren’t they?’ Sandro said. ‘She’d have warned Benedetta, maybe Benedetta told someone else about Nielsson doing the rounds. Benedetta was whisked off to the funny farm by her brother quick enough, wasn’t she?’
Beside him, Pietro was shifting from one foot to the other, uneasy, beside the car illegally parked up on the pavement. In the dark street, a rowdy gang of young bucks outside the bar drinking beer were just beginning to notice the two old farts peering in at the window of Kaufmann’s studio.
‘Maybe it was Kaufmann the barman heard Benedetta phoning in a panic after she’d met Nielsson up at La Serenita,’ said Pietro, slowly. ‘And Kaufmann calmed her down.’
Sandro knelt, concealed by the car. Three plastic sacks sat near the door waiting to be taken to the charity’s distribution centre. He looked down at his palms as if he expected to see the marks the blue ties had made in them, hauling her stuff across town. Slowly he felt in his pocket and extracted the scrap of plastic he’d found on the floor of the camper-van.
Benedetta hated Nielsson because of the rapes and because of the baby. Had she confessed to her brother that she’d done something terrible in that shack? And Martine was her friend, her protector.
How Kaufmann had made contact again with Benedetta Salieri, he didn’t know, nor why, but it was clear she had, and some time ago. Covering her tracks, changing history, becoming the do-gooder, the redeemer: perhaps Benedet
ta had never known the part she’d played back then. He hadn’t, after all, too dazzled by Johanna Nielsson’s otherworldly beauty, by her strangeness: the bait.
Pietro was at his shoulder. Sandro pointed to the bags stacked inside the glass door and held out the scrap of polythene, which had black printing on it, as did the bags. ‘It could be anything –’ Pietro began but then he leaned closer. ‘The blue ties,’ he said. ‘They’re …’ and they both saw in their heads the post-mortem images of Nielsson’s wrists, the blue plastic so tight it had cut into the stretched and desiccated flesh and tendons.
‘So perhaps when Benedetta got back from La Serenita, they talked it over, decided they needed closure, or whatever? Healing. Kaufmann and Benedetta, for mutual support?’ Pietro spoke slowly.
But only Benedetta needed support, thought Sandro. It must have been Kaufmann’s idea. A trip back to where it all began. Clear everything up between them, once and for all. And they met Nielsson in her camper and the three of them went up there to the little shack, on some pretext, to the place where they’d carried out their rituals, perhaps, all those years ago.
‘This healing outing back to La Vipera that went horribly wrong,’ said Pietro slowly. ‘But if –’
Sandro finished the sentence for him. ‘If it was all about healing old wounds,’ said Sandro, ‘how come Kaufmann went prepared for a different sort of closure?’
‘With bin bags,’ said Pietro, ‘and plastic ties?’
‘I think Nielsson told Benedetta something about her friend Martine that Kaufmann didn’t want her to know,’ said Sandro.
‘And where is Kaufmann now?’ said Pietro, his voice going up a notch, alarmed. ‘Has she done a runner or –?’ And the phone rang, at that moment, in Sandro’s pocket.
It was Enzo, and he was practically shouting. ‘Don’t you read your messages?’ Beside himself: frightened, raging jerkily, half-weeping. This wasn’t like Enzo. ‘Don’t you read your damn messages, Sandro?’
‘What?’ Sandro’s heart was in his mouth now. ‘What? Just tell me, for Christ’s sake.’
‘She’s bleeding. I’ve got to get her to the hospital but she insists she has to go after Luisa – she keeps trying to leave.’
‘Who’s bleeding?’
Enzo was sobbing now, sobbing as if his heart would break. ‘Giuli. She’s pregnant – or was pregnant, I don’t know. I didn’t know anything until they called me. She’s having a bleed. I’m in the ambulance with her now – they’ll scan her as soon as they can.’
‘All right,’ said Sandro, ‘all right,’ his heart going like the clappers. ‘I’m so sorry, Enzo. Shall I come –?’
‘No,’ said Enzo sharply. ‘You have to go after Luisa. She went off while Giuli’s back was turned and she, she thinks she can handle it but Giuli says she can’t. If you’d read your bloody messages …’ His voice turned muffled and Sandro heard the sound of muttered voices in the background, of mechanical beeping, Giuli’s voice straining to interrupt.
‘But where –?’
‘Read your bloody messages, Sandro,’ said Enzo, wild with anguish now. ‘She’s gone to Sant’Anna.’ And he hung up.
*
There was no more lightning, no thunder, only the rain coming down in sheets in the pitch dark. As Luisa stumbled downhill back to the car she could hear Marte calling after her but she paid no attention. She yanked open the car door and climbed inside on hands and knees, groping in the glove compartment. She didn’t even try to get the car moving: she’d hardly been able to keep upright herself on the treacherous unmade surface, and she didn’t want to waste time listening to the wheels spin in the mud.
Nothing but sweet wrappers and old envelopes. Luisa transferred her search to the side pocket, then the far one. And then as she shifted her weight back the car moved too and it rolled out from under the passenger seat: Sandro’s ancient torch. She climbed out again and began her awkward, hasty descent between the trees, her shoes clogged with earth and sliding on the treacherous combination of rubble, mud and leaves.
The climb down seemed to take forever, her breath hoarse in her ears, her heart pounding in her chest and the rushing patter of the rain in the leaves all around her almost deafening. She could hear running water, too, gathering force, streams turning into torrents as they did in these hills. She thought of leaving the overgrown drive to cut across country to her destination but that ominous sound kept her on the straight path down. How far was it?
Because she knew where Benedetta would go now, even if her ‘friend’ hadn’t lured her, talking of babies: to the same place, the old place. The place where Luisa had never been but where whatever had passed between Johanna Nielsson and Sandro still hung with the stale smell of drugs and cheap theories of love and life in the musty air, where Benedetta had fled her mother’s private doctor to miscarry her child.
And then, with a last stumbling rush, Luisa reached the road and the water was gurgling down her side of it so she had to jump across a flooded metre. She was soaked, from her hair to her feet, but she hardly felt it: once you were that wet it no longer mattered. She hurried on up the dark road. It was as she came to Maria Clara Martinelli’s house, no more than a chink of light uphill under scrubby foliage, that she heard a new sound, a gleeful roaring chatter, swung the torch around and glimpsed a moped parked under the trees, and then black water, running towards her.
Luisa felt it in the same moment as she saw it: almost a river rushing down beside Martinelli’s house and across the road, gurgling and swirling over her feet – it was up to her knees, and as she tried hurriedly to back out of it, she realised too late that it was deep enough to have an undertow and she was down, on her backside, the water running over her. As she fell back on her elbows and for a second was under, she felt the strangest sensation, as though she was dissolving, as though she was becoming part of the river. As though, like Johanna Nielsson, she was dead and being drawn down into the earth, pulled into the leaf mould and dirt under the trees, and there was nothing she could do about it.
And then she sat up, scrambling, dripping – mumbling about God knew what. And the torch, which was somehow still in her hand, went out.
Shit. She heard herself say it. On hands and knees, she crawled forwards – the torch still in her hand, knuckles scraping on the tarmac – and was through the flood. Staggering to her feet, she registered that her tights were torn and one of her shoes was gone in the torrent. She abandoned the other in the middle of the road and, hobbling, began to run. She was soaked, dripping, feeling heavy as lead: in the back of her mind, a logical voice told her that she didn’t even know where she was going, she didn’t know what – or who – she’d find when she got there. But she kept on in a kind of awkward trot. She looked down, realising she still held the useless weight of the torch, and stuffed it into her pocket.
At the bend, the rain seemed to be easing, gusting now rather than falling straight down. Luisa’s feet were cut and her chest burned but she kept moving, on, round the corner. She couldn’t see it, but she knew it was there, a deeper dark in the black cleft of the hill that rose ahead of her, a blank dead end. She knew it was there with the curl of that monstrous drawing on its flank, half-buried in the hillside. She knew too that she was going slower, lurching in a zigzag despite herself; her skirt flapped soaking against her legs and she burned and shivered. Her cheeks felt hot but inside her it was cold. The temptation was there, after all these years, a lifetime of service, decades of fretting over Sandro, six years watching out for the cancer and Giuli, the temptation simply to lie down in the rain and rest, but stubbornly her legs kept moving.
She didn’t know what the sound was for a moment and then she understood that it was the cessation of one of the sounds: miraculously, the rain had stopped. The multifarious roar ebbed, reduced to the patter of her own heart, her own hoarse breath, the dripping in the trees and that far-off headlong rush of water downhill. Luisa slowed on the road, registering that there was just the slightest pearly e
dge to the dark, and she looked up to see a chink in the cloud. The moon was hidden still but a trace of its luminescence turned the edge of a cloud to silver and with that faint gleam of light she saw the roofline of La Vipera and stopped.
Think.
She moved to the edge of the road, where the trees gave shadow. The ground was more uneven here and her pace slowed even further, her bare feet numb and silent. She was on the same side of the road as La Vipera but she kept her head down, until she raised it and she was there. It rose above her. She put out her hands in the dark, as if to ward it off, and walked forwards like that, like a zombie in a film, across slimy grass and then something sharp, a broken bottle that tipped her sideways, arms flailing. She was there in the rubble and ivy at the back of the house, and the great wall rose above her. Half the remaining ivy had come away in the storm and Luisa raised her arms, as if to cover the curved concentric lines underneath. She flattened her body against the wall, trying to suppress a harsh sob rising inside her – for being lost in the cold and the wet, for the babies lost and cold and dead, hers and Benedetta’s, and all the misguided idiocy that had led to this moment.
And then, as the moon came out from behind its cloud to show her her own outspread hand against the wall, she heard them. They were inside.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
‘S LOW DOWN,’ said Pietro in alarm, but Sandro barely heard him. They’d crawled the five miles out of town, traffic jams and burst water mains, and then quite suddenly the rain had stopped, a couple of miles down the superstrada. He didn’t even have to think about putting his foot down – it did it all by itself, the big powerful car leaping under him.
Pietro had regretted letting him drive the minute he’d climbed behind the wheel, but he’d driven seven hours himself, more, and he was wiped out. ‘Don’t you understand?’ Sandro had said, his hand out. ‘I’ve got to. This is Luisa.’ And Pietro, grey with exhaustion, had handed him the keys.
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