A Darkness Descending (20 page)

He had stood at the door while Rosselli identified his wife’s body, pulled on rollers from a drawer, not yet autopsied: he had seen the marble-white arm laid alongside the torso, and the contrast between pale profile and rusty red hair, life unmistakably, irretrievably gone, though the ghost of her humanity was still there, in the gleam of her fingernails and the softly freckled plane of a high white cheekbone. Rosselli had become still then, frozen in the attitude of looking down on his dead wife, as if his life had stopped there too and he would need to be led by the hand through the rest of his days.

When he had spoken, his voice was no more than a whisper. ‘Yes,’ he’d said. ‘It’s her.’ The mortuary assistant had waited, looking anxiously from Rosselli to the policeman attending the identification, whose name was Tufato: eventually the officer had nodded curtly and the drawer had been slid back in.

You could never tell a hundred per cent from the reaction, because even murderers often experienced genuine emotion – remorse, yes, but also grief, horror, disbelief, shock – when confronted with what they had done.

Catching himself looking at Niccolò Rosselli with this thought in his head, Sandro had stuffed his hands in his pockets in shame. It was a reflex. Perhaps he should be grateful he still had it, for professional reasons, but at the moment it was inappropriate, to say the least. Niccolò Rosselli’s wife had committed suicide in a hotel room: she had checked in alone for that purpose.

All the same, as they had emerged from the low ugly complex of buildings – a temporary solution to the town’s expansion, Tufato had informed them apologetically, and more like a light industrial unit than anything else, a place where catering ovens or light fittings might be produced – Sandro had found himself wondering whether this provincial police station would pursue any other line of inquiry. Certainly it would be their duty to establish that the woman had died by her own hand, and up to a point, to determine why. Up to a point: Sandro was uneasily sure that they would not pursue the
why
any further than was strictly necessary, and certainly not as far as would satisfy her grieving husband.

Why
was a huge question … why leave this world, the blue sky, the sea, a newborn child? Any answer, it seemed to Sandro, that would rely entirely on a scientific solution – chemical changes in the body following childbirth, say, depression – would never be sufficient. But it did not follow that it was the duty of the police to provide philosophical truths as well as simple facts.

Tufato, thickset, bullet-headed, had seemed a decent enough sort, and not stupid: he had not looked at Rosselli with anything like suspicion. Not as far as Sandro had been able to tell, anyway. Tufato had outlined what they knew. Flavia had checked into her room on Sunday at midday, had come out of her room only for breakfast on Monday and since then had remained in it, with the ‘Do not disturb’ sign up.

‘Did she have any visitors?’ Sandro had asked and Tufato had frowned, moving his head in a small, stiff, negative motion that to Sandro did not indicate anything but a reluctance to answer the question, at this point. Was Rosselli a suspect? Sandro had glanced swiftly at the man he supposed was now his employer, but Niccolò sat there, his eyes dull, lost. He seemed to have registered neither the question nor the implications of Tufato’s reticence.

The investigating officer had cleared his throat, and when Sandro’s question had faded into the silence, had stolidly taken a brief statement and punctuated his questions with scrupulously proper expressions of sympathy and regret.
When did you last see your wife? What was her state of mind
?

It had not felt much like a formal interview: they had allowed Sandro to be present. ‘I’m a friend,’ he’d said, when they asked, and looking at Rosselli’s pale face and shaking hands, they had agreed that he might sit in, if he kept quiet.

Shifting in his seat as his questions were answered, the policeman had been as uneasy as Sandro, to whom the burden of explanation seemed to have been passed, now felt. Sandro had seen his eyes slide away from Rosselli’s bleary, magnified brown gaze. Rosselli, he’d noticed, had not taken off his glasses to polish them at any point in the brief interview.

He’d been able to tell them when he last saw his wife – but then Sandro could have told them that. To everything else he had seemed only to be able to repeat, ‘I don’t know,’ in a mumbling monotone, and Sandro had felt a surge of sympathy. Unpicking those last days or weeks, disentangling them from the tidal wave of remorse and guilt at not having seen this coming: no wonder.
Dangerous
, he’d thought, stop identifying with the man. And then,
Why not
? You’re not the investigating officer. You’re meant to be on his side.

‘Did she leave – any explanation? Any message?’ Rosselli had waited patiently until the policeman’s questions had finished before posing his own. ‘A note?’ He’d frowned as he pronounced the word, with a kind of distaste for it, as if it were a melodramatic prop from a cheap thriller.

The policeman had shaken his big head, taking off his cap and running a hand over his shaven scalp. Sandro had been fairly sure from the questions the man had already asked that there had been no suicide note, and it hadn’t surprised him. For every scrawled
sorry
or rambling litany of grievances and accusations, there were plenty who left only stony silence behind them. Who could, in extremis, find an adequate explanation? An intelligent person would, he supposed, find suicide harder to justify than a fool, and besides there would be the same distaste, he imagined, in Flavia Matteo as in her partner for the detective-story cliché.

‘There was some evidence that your – that Ms Matteo – that your partner sat down to write something,’ the officer had said carefully, staring at his cap on the desk between them. ‘But for whatever reason, she failed. There was a piece of paper on the desk, and a pen. The chair behind the desk – it would appear she had sat at the chair, she picked up the pen – but she didn’t write anything. It isn’t uncommon.’

Now, with Rosselli motionless on the bed with his back to him, Sandro felt a sudden, overwhelming desire to have seen that other hotel room, that chair, that desk with its single sheet of paper. He wanted the chance to examine the apparently inconsequential things, to get down on his hands and knees in that room and look under that desk, to take the unused sheet of paper in his hands: he wanted to lean close enough over the bed to see the impression of a head in the pillow, to know what scent Flavia Matteo wore. Damn, thought Sandro, grinding his teeth in frustration as much at the persistence of his detective instinct as at his powerlessness. How had he come to find himself here, with this man, having these thoughts?

Coming out of the morgue, Rosselli had looked bad.

‘Are you all right?’ Sandro had asked wearily. Stupid question. ‘Perhaps we should be heading back.’

The man had stared at him. ‘Back?’ he’d asked. ‘Back where?’ He’d shifted, looking behind him at the morgue, and for a moment there in the car park he had seemed to Sandro no more than a dusty smudge in the afternoon sunshine, a mirage created by the heat haze, a grieving ghost made out of the city’s soot and sin, out of place among the striped parasols and the ozone. Without his wife, he might just disappear altogether, Sandro had thought, and then he had realized he was thinking as much about himself.

‘Well, home,’ Sandro had said, clearing his throat.

‘Home,’ Rosselli had said, still looking at the morgue, turning the word over as though trying to understand it.

‘Florence,’ Sandro had elaborated, shifting from foot to foot. ‘Back to the city.’ He had longed for its shadows and cool stone streets: it had seemed bizarre to him now that he and Luisa, Enzo and Giuli, had separately come out to a place very much like this only weeks ago – holidays seemed an aberration. Bizarre too that the summer still seemed to be going on without them.

‘I’m not going – home,’ Rosselli had said. ‘I can’t go home. I’m staying here.’ Sandro had waited, and as he’d watched something began to kindle behind those thick glasses. ‘Why did she come here?’ The focus, smouldering now, had come to rest on Sandro. ‘You can help me find out, can’t you?’ He’d frowned as if trying to remember how Sandro had come to be there, as if he had quite forgotten that he had asked him. ‘You’re an investigator. That’s what you’re for.’

‘Well, I—’

‘I didn’t ask him if I could go there,’ Rosselli had said. ‘Can I go?’

‘Go where?’ Sandro had asked gently.

‘The hotel,’ Rosselli had said, and his eyes behind the glasses looked cloudy and dark. ‘Where she died.’ Sandro had taken him by the elbow and tried to guide him back towards the car, but felt a resistance. Rosselli had stood his ground, and seemed to grow momentarily taller, more substantial. The smudge of dust had become a man again.

‘One night,’ he had said. ‘We stay here one night. That’s all.’

And so here they were.

Sandro stood in the window of the hotel room, holding the drifting curtain back with one hand, and looked out across the sea. The sky was a dark electric blue, a few scattered high clouds luminous in the last of the light, and the sea turning black in the shadow of the headland. The sight was beautiful, he supposed, even though Flavia Matteo would never see it. It would still be there after they’d all gone and the world had turned back to jungle and desert, but would it still be beautiful with no one to see it, or to say that it was? Sandro closed his eyes to stop himself wishing Luisa were there with him, and the image of that dark headland, somehow negative, imprinted itself on his closed eyelids.

Below the window, the evening
passeggiata
was starting up on the wide boardwalk. Languidly a handsome woman was pushing an elaborate double perambulator containing twin newborn babies, her slow walk deliberate so as to garner the maximum praise for that clever trick of fertility. She was nodding gracious thanks to the admiring comments, though Sandro found himself reflecting, by way of distraction from the silence behind him in the darkening room, that twins, these days, were very often down to science. The woman pushing the pram looked much the same age as Flavia Matteo, forty odd, one of those miracle mothers. Of course, she might be their grandmother.

‘Let’s go and get something to eat,’ he said abruptly. ‘A bit of fresh air.’

Obediently Rosselli stood up.

At the desk, a portly middle-aged man in a striped waistcoat was now on duty: he looked up and Sandro saw an inquisitive glint in the man’s eye before professional discretion made him bow his gleaming head back over the evening newspaper. There were few people, Sandro reflected, as curious as hotel staff, and fewer still as nosy as those in his country’s seaside establishments. And for some reason, the thought perked him up.

‘Need to get a toothbrush,’ he remarked, thinking aloud as he held the lobby door for Niccolò Rosselli to go ahead of him. ‘Before the pharmacies close.’

The concierge’s head was immediately raised. ‘The nearest pharmacy is on the Via Roma,’ he said. ‘Left, then left again. He doesn’t close till eight.’

Sandro stopped, hand still on the door and Rosselli out on the street, waiting, ever obedient. ‘Thank you,’ he said. ‘That’s very helpful, um—’ Unlike the surly soldier at the barracks’ reception desk the concierge had no identifying tag: instead he seemed prepared actually to be forthcoming.

‘Salvatore, Signore Cellini,’ he said, eyes bright with interest. ‘If there’s anything else, I would be glad to assist.’

The streets were not packed, as they would have been a month back, but they were busy. It was a family place. Grandmothers were the dominant group, middle-aged and elderly women with a toddler or an infant in tow, some widowed, some with grumbling husbands along for the evening air and the chance to get out of cramped accommodation and to complain to another man. Gradually the feeling that Sandro had at first, that he and Rosselli were like a pair of ghosts moving among the living, diminished. Just keep walking.

He wasn’t particularly hungry when they set out, it had to be said, but there was a market strung along the boardwalk and the air was full of the smell of street food, pizza slices and basil and
schiacciata
, peanut brittle and frying fish. Sandro stole a glance at Niccolò Rosselli; his hollow cheeks warned that Sandro would have to force the man to a table and stand over him like a parent. An old-fashioned baby carriage passed them, a child in a knitted bonnet sitting upright.

‘They think it was the child, don’t they?’ said Rosselli. ‘The child brought it on. Flavia’s – depression.’ He was motionless, staring after the pram.

‘I don’t know,’ said Sandro, hedging, then deciding to be straight with the man. ‘Yes. Probably. It is – ah, statistically – the likeliest cause. And it’s – well, I don’t know, we’ve – we didn’t – I have no children. But it can be – what’s the term? – a life-changing event.’

‘Ah, yes,’ said Rosselli. ‘Life-changing.’ He sighed, and for a moment Sandro wondered if he had even wanted the child. He was surprised by how horrified he felt at the thought.

‘What do you think?’ he said carefully.

‘I never – felt it would be right for us to have a child,’ Rosselli said abruptly. ‘I always thought she didn’t either. But then – out of the blue, or it seemed out of the blue to me – she decided we had to have one.’ He twisted his neck in a gesture of discomfort. ‘And then it seemed – to be too much for her. No sleep, she found it hard to eat. She wouldn’t talk to me about it.’

He turned to look at Sandro. ‘But this began before the child was born,’ said Rosselli, and Sandro was startled by a different note in his voice. ‘Long before.’ Behind the glasses the misty brown eyes seemed sharper, and then as swiftly as he had divulged this new fact, he swerved and changed tack. ‘Remind me,’ he said. ‘How you came to be involved with – this? With us.’

Now he asks, thought Sandro, taken aback by this sudden display of sharpness, very different from the cultivated professorial vagueness. Was this the real Rosselli? Was this what explained his – and the Frazione’s – steep rise to prominence? ‘I – um – well. You did ask me to come,’ he said.