A Darkness Descending (15 page)

It was how Sandro found her ten minutes after she’d hung up on Giusy and twenty minutes before she should herself be back in the shop, leaning against the kitchen counter and staring at nothing. She collected herself only partially when he spoke, looking around as if she’d just woken up.

‘What a mess,’ he said, setting his bag down angrily and sinking beside it at the table. ‘What a fuck-up.’

Luisa blinked at that, because Sandro hardly ever swore. ‘Preventable,’ he said as if to himself, ‘totally preventable. No one has to kill themselves.’ He put his face in his hands. Gingerly Luisa set a hand on his shoulder. ‘You want a coffee?’ she said. He grunted.

‘How’d the old lady take it?’ he asked as she unscrewed the little aluminium machine, put water in and meticulously began to load the filter. Work would have to wait another half an hour. By then the sound of the baby’s crying might have gone from her ears.

‘You talked to her,’ said Luisa. ‘What do you think?’

She’d only seen the woman’s reaction to what Sandro was telling her through the kitchen door, the baby’s cries drowning out the tone of Maria Rosselli’s voice as well as her words. But the expression on her face had been contemptuous, unsurprised, cold.

‘She sounded like she couldn’t care less,’ said Sandro. Setting the coffee pot on the stove, Luisa turned back to her husband. ‘Yes,’ she said, eyeing him. ‘But why does that matter? Suicide. It’s not like you’re looking for suspects.’

‘No,’ agreed Sandro glumly.

‘And if it wasn’t suicide – well, it’s not as if you’re a police officer any more, is it? Murder’s their job; murder, manslaughter, all that.’

‘The woman’s found,’ said Sandro. ‘So in theory none of it’s my business any more, not even her suicide.’ He darted a glance at her. ‘Our business.’

The coffee soon bubbled up. Luisa set a cup before him and leaned back against the counter, arms folded tight against her chest.

‘So why,’ she asked, ‘does it still feel like it is?’

*

Not much of a place, thought Chiara, setting out her books tidily on the table in the sitting room, but it’s ours. In theory anyway: it would take time, she supposed, before it felt like it. Trees outside the apartment window, old-lady furniture she supposed the last tenant had left behind, the kitchen dingy with age. She felt a sudden anxious tug of nostalgia for the bedroom she’d had since she was born and the smell of her mother’s cooking. Homesick.

She’d tried her best. Not a wife, exactly – how could she be a wife, at her age? – but then a housewife wasn’t what he wanted anyway. The nostalgia changed just fractionally, became tinged with panic. It was so quiet, that was all, in the leafy suburbs, a part of the city she’d never known well.

She’d get to know it, she’d use the local shops, she’d take the bus to the university and get on with her studies … and he’d come home from work and ask her how her day had been. She’d be able to talk to her friends again, the girls: would she be able to tell them what it was like, this kind of – love? She imagined telling certain people, there were those who’d understand. Just – not the girls she’d known since she was in nursery. And not her parents.

‘He travels a lot.’ She practised saying this to her mother and could picture her face:
Doesn’t this man value my daughter that he should leave her alone, for days on end
? Mortified, wounded, angry, just as Chiara had last seen her.

‘It means I can come home and see you and Babbo,’ she would then be able to explain peaceably. ‘While he’s gone.’ Meaning it would all settle down and they’d have the same kind of relationship most offspring have with their parents after they’ve moved out. But it didn’t have quite the right ring to it; it sounded, as she rehearsed it in her head, as though she was saying she’d have to sneak away behind his back if she ever wanted to see her parents again. And that wasn’t what she meant, was it?

She didn’t know. She didn’t know how to explain what this was. Only that from the moment he’d touched her on the shoulder as she’d emerged from the Frazione meeting in the heat of early summer and made her turn to him, his long cool fingers on the exposed skin, and she’d looked into his face, Chiara had been his. His to do with as he wanted.

How did you know, feel, instinctively, that someone understood you, understood those things you had always secretly wanted and imagined would come to you when you were grown-up? Murmuring to herself while she waited in the heat for him to get home, rehearsing how she might try to explain it to her mother, Chiara could only say it was nothing like that little, uncomfortable thing you felt in school when a boy first showed interest. There’d been no small talk, no going for a
gelato
or to the swimming pool. He’d given her books, he’d said, lilting his head in that way he did, because he knew she had the intelligence for them. His touch was light but strong. We wait, he’d said, his hands on her hips as she yearned up towards him, as if he knew what was in her heart. For that, we wait. For sex.

Sometimes, when he was gone, the thought would come into her head that she hardly knew him at all.

*

‘The damned police!’ said Calzaghe belligerently. ‘After a season like this. That’s all we need.’

He was glaring at Vesna as if it were her fault.

‘I just found her,’ said the chambermaid, setting her jaw mutinously. ‘I didn’t ask her to top herself, did I?’

She felt cold, although the sun was high now and shone straight on to the verandah where they sat. In the swing seat Calzaghe was sweating profusely into his vest: Vesna found herself wondering if this was his stress response, like hers was to shiver, or if he was just a fat pig.

Parked out on the street for all to see was a police car that had contained one male and one female officer – Vesna recognized them both from around town, where there was little for them to do aside from reprimanding beach vendors and moving on foreign students sleeping under the promenade and in the park. They had looked bored and disdainful as they took her statement and moved in and out of the hotel. Was suicide really so far beneath them? Maybe they cultivated that look, and underneath they were feeling something else: it was a characteristic Vesna had noticed among all officials everywhere, among soldiers and military police and those who sat behind counters and passed judgement on who might stay and who might go. The male police officer had, it was true, looked a little pale, but the woman maintained an expression of disgust, talking into her lapel microphone to summon someone else.

Behind the police car was a small van, modified with a boxy extension on the back and containing forensics equipment. As far as she could see it was unmarked but Vesna imagined that every nosy old woman who passed – in turn looking from one vehicle to the other then across to the open front door of the Stella Maris and the two of them sitting fidgeting on the verandah, she and Calzaghe, quite the odd couple – every one of them would put two and two together, adding the sum to an earlier sighting of the ambulance and coming up with an approximation of the grisly truth.

‘That’s all we need,’ repeated Calzaghe at her side, staring off into the laurels. ‘This is the end.’ No one ever sat on this verandah, with no view of the sea, only the unkempt garden. It came to Vesna that he was right. The place was doomed: the two guests in the dining room this morning had already paid up and fled, and although a third had gone early to the beach and was therefore oblivious, they’d be gone by the evening, she’d bet on it.

Overpriced and shabby and obscure, the Stella Maris had been dying on its feet long before the police turned up. Why had the woman come here? Because it didn’t matter to her where she died?

The ambulance had not taken her away. There’d been nothing the paramedics could do, and so they had packed up, left her for the forensics team and then the coroner’s office. She was still up there.

They’d phoned someone in Florence. The male police officer had paced the gravel talking gently – or as gently as he was capable of doing, Vesna could tell it was an effort. That must be a hard job. You’d be hoping you were wrong:
Oh, right, your wife’s sitting beside you, I’m so sorry.
But if you’d reached the right person, what were the right words?

‘I’m so sorry,’ she’d heard the policeman repeat through gritted teeth, over and over. ‘You’re going to have to come and identify her.’

Chapter Ten

W
ELL, THIS WAS A
turn-up.

Standing at the centre of the crowded Piazza Signoria where he had just watched Luisa head away from him towards Frollini and work, Sandro thanked the man and hung up. It was hardly appropriate to feel anything like exhilarated, but nonetheless he did feel a sense of challenge, the knowledge that something was required of him, and that was better than the way he’d been feeling before.

His
telefonino
had rung in his pocket while he was kissing her off, a hand on each arm, his handsome, frowning wife. Looking into her face and seeing – from the way she would not quite look back – that something was worrying her that she wasn’t saying, at least not yet. She’d pulled away from him at the sound of the phone, raised a hand and gone, away from him through the busy square. It was a beautiful, warm September midday, and on the terraces of the Signoria’s bars lunch and
aperitivi
were being ordered and enjoyed. Sandro could see at least four pretty women from where he stood, all with men, all at least twenty years younger than him. That was all right: some days, age didn’t seem to matter.

‘Hello?’

It was Niccolò Rosselli: Sandro made a mental note to put the man’s name in his phone’s address book. Why? This was unfinished, that was why.

‘I need someone to go with me,’ Rosselli had said without preamble. ‘I can’t do it on my own. I – my mother doesn’t even think I’m safe to drive.’

Right. The situation clarified abruptly. If he had to choose between Maria Rosselli and a washed-up private detective on such a journey – the hour and a half on the atrocious Pisa superstrada to identify the body of his wife at a seaside morgue – well, even if Maria Rosselli were his own mother, he, Sandro, would go for the man. So she’d be lobbying him to take her, and Niccolò Rosselli, possibly for the first time in his life, was standing up to her.

What about the
avvocato
? Rosselli’s oldest friend, from university? Sandro thought about Carlo Bastone in his dusty office, podgy, distracted by book-learning and fine principles, disorganized. Would he come good in a crisis? It occurred to him that the Frazione had to be more vulnerable than he’d thought, if the only man Niccolò Rosselli wanted at his side in this situation was Sandro himself.

There was something heart-rending about Rosselli’s extreme agitation. About his transparent not knowing – not knowing what he should be doing or feeling or saying, a man who had relied on books and intelligence and the rational, and had never before come up against the unavoidably real. ‘Do you think it’ll be all right?’ Rosselli had asked. ‘I mean, they won’t wonder why I’m bringing you?’

‘You can say I’m a friend, if you like,’ Sandro had said. ‘But actually it’s none of their business; you can bring whomever you wish in this kind of situation.’

A friend. Was that what Rosselli wanted him to be? For the first time Sandro’s gut stirred with the realization of what he’d probably have to do. He wouldn’t just be a chauffeur, he’d have to go in there, see the body of the woman on the mortuary slab, smell the chemicals, drive home with the sharp stink still in his nostrils.

And wonder why. Why a woman with a newborn child and a loving man had killed herself.

‘I’ll be there in twenty minutes,’ he said. ‘We can go in my car.’

Nonetheless, when the mobile almost immediately rang again he could feel it, the pulse of adrenaline that came from being needed. It was Pietro this time, and Sandro sobered instantly, guilt lowering his voice.

‘Sorry, old friend,’ he said. ‘I should have called you.’ Only Pietro hadn’t called him either, had he? Not in months – until today. ‘It’s been – there’s been a lot on.’

‘I heard,’ said Pietro, and Sandro detected the coolness in his ex-partner’s voice. ‘You’re involved in this Rosselli business.’

Sandro wondered how much he’d know: most of it, was his guess. Something like that happens, the jungle networks light up with it. A politician’s wife commits suicide …

‘Yes,’ he said hesitantly, and suddenly the most important thing seemed to be to get that chill out of the atmosphere between them. ‘But what about you? Luisa told me … Or at least told me what Gloria had told her. Chiara’s moved out?’

There was a silence and then Pietro exhaled, a sound of frustration and unhappiness and anger mixed.

‘She has,’ he said. Another silence, then it burst from him. ‘Is this the modern world? I thought we’d have another five, six, maybe ten years. And she doesn’t even introduce us to the guy?’

‘I’m sorry,’ said Sandro, feeling helpless. What would he do if it were him? His daughter? ‘Have you asked around? Asked her friends about him?’

The next silence was different, thoughtful. ‘You think – no,’ said Pietro, with growing determination. ‘What, snoop on my own daughter? Ask those kids I’ve known since they were in nappies for help with my own child?’

Stubborn, thought Sandro, taking Pietro’s point all the same. ‘She been in touch?’

‘Not with me,’ said Pietro shortly. ‘I haven’t talked to Gloria since I left this morning. We’ve been busy – like you.’ Rebuked, Sandro stayed quiet. ‘So. You were looking for Rosselli’s wife, were you?’ his friend went on. ‘And now you’ve found her.’

‘He wants me to go with him to Viareggio this afternoon,’ said Sandro, aware of wanting pathetically to sound to his ex-partner like he still had something useful to do with his life, even if he wasn’t a policeman any more. ‘To ID the body.’ He found himself checking his watch. ‘In a half-hour or so. I said I’d pick him up.’

‘Don’t envy you that,’ said Pietro, and Sandro didn’t know if it was his imagination but was there something wary in his friend’s voice? Some combination of probing and evasion, as if they didn’t know or trust each other enough to ask a straight question? ‘He’s an odd one, isn’t he? Does he even know you?’