A Darkness Descending (25 page)

‘Yes,’ said Sandro, ‘I’ve been there. To the – police morgue. I spoke with the officer.’ He put his head on one side. ‘You think it was a suicide?’

Vesna drew in her lower lip and her eyes widened, seeming darker. ‘You saw her?’ she said, very quietly. ‘Of course, suicide. What else?’

Sandro nodded. ‘What else indeed?’ he said, almost to himself. ‘Perhaps she didn’t mean to do it.’ Vesna drew a hand quickly across her cheek, wiping at something, but she seemed dry-eyed.

‘No one came,’ he said. ‘The police said you told them she had no visitors. But – forgive me – are you the only person working here? The only staff member?’ Vesna shrugged, holding his gaze. ‘And you’re here all the time? What about when you – get away? For your coffee. Or anything.’

Did she have a boyfriend? She was pretty enough, but perhaps she had no time for boyfriends, or no patience. ‘I don’t get away so often,’ she said, with the air of admitting something shameful. ‘There is Signore Calzaghe, of course,’ she went on, frowning. ‘He’s always there, sitting on the verandah. He watches. I can’t go for any break without checking with him first.’

‘Always there,’ repeated Sandro. ‘Only not now.’

Again she shrugged, putting a hand out to the surface of the table and raising her palm to inspect it for dust. ‘He locked the kitchen,’ she said with the ghost of a smile. ‘So I can’t steal anything. No guests, no one to watch any more. He’s probably at his mother’s place.’

Sandro nodded. ‘But they asked him too, anyway?’ he said. ‘The police asked him about visitors?’

She nodded, still watching him intently. ‘You think someone else is involved?’

‘There’s always someone else involved,’ he said. ‘In my experience. Where unhappiness is concerned.’ He spoke with deliberate care, because she was foreign, but he saw a watchful understanding in her eyes. ‘I’m here with her husband, you see. He needs to know why, of course. It’s a terrible thing, to feel one did not see, did not feel, so much unhappiness.’

‘And a child,’ she said, pain evident in the dark eyes now. ‘She – had had a child. Just – recently.’ It was not a question.

‘You read that in the newspapers?’ He couldn’t work it out otherwise. But had the paper mentioned it?

‘I don’t read their papers here,’ she said with an edge of disdain. ‘I didn’t read, I saw. I saw on her body, she had had a child. I saw—’ And she broke off.

‘You saw?’ Then he understood, or partially he did. ‘Ah. You found her.’

Reflexively Vesna – and in that second he wished he knew her surname, out of some desire to award her more respect – brought both arms up across her chest, hands resting on her shoulders, and she nodded.

‘She was up there two days alone, dead. Or thinking of doing it,’ she said. ‘And we were down here. I wish I had known.’

‘You might have saved her?’ said Sandro gently, leaning forward on the hard chair, elbows on his knees as he looked up at her. ‘I think there are others closer to her she might have talked to, and she didn’t. It seems unlikely that you would have been able to help her.’

You never knew, of course. To look at her, Vesna might have been just the woman to talk to. But he couldn’t say that.

The maid glanced down at the floor ‘I know,’ she muttered. ‘I know, I know.’ Shutting him up.

Sandro could see her unfocused stare, and he knew she was remembering something terrible. It was an awful moment, seeing what was left when life had gone; Sandro had seen enough of it himself. There’s so little in a human body, when the brain’s stopped working, the lungs, the heart. He would not ask her about that. Not yet.

‘Did you talk to her at all?’ he asked. ‘Did you – I don’t know, I expect it’s hard, guests come and go. But did you form any impression of her at all?’

Vesna raised her head and looked at him curiously, as if this was something she had not been asked already. ‘Impression?’ She straightened, leaned back in the chair and looked up at the dusty plaster cornices of the ceiling, her bare legs stretched in front of her; he could see the downy hairs on them. She wore ugly rubber overshoes like a medical orderly, but her ankles were fine-boned. Sandro averted his eyes.

She brought her head down and looked at him. ‘She was frightened,’ she said, sounding surprised. ‘That’s the impression I had of her.’

‘Did you say that to the police?’

Slowly Vesna shook her head. ‘No – I – no. They didn’t really ask me – that. And I don’t think they would understand what I mean.’ She chewed her lip, eyes dark.

Frightened. Of what? Of whom? ‘The room
was
locked,’ said Sandro quickly. ‘When you found her? No one could have—’

She stared at him. ‘The door was locked, yes,’ she said. ‘From the inside. I had to use my pass key to get in.’ She passed a hand over her face, and Sandro shifted in his chair at her discomfort. ‘Her key was on the dressing table. The police took it.’

There was a brief silence. Then: ‘Why do you think she was frightened? What gave you that feeling?’ He wondered: if Flavia Matteo was planning suicide, she might well have been afraid. What would that fear have looked like? He felt something, in the bright clean sunshine, he felt the presence of darkness through the door that led back into the lobby, at his back.

He must have moved, turned his head, because Vesna said tentatively, ‘Do you want to see? Her room?’ Sandro almost shook his head, because the truth was he dreaded even going back into the lobby.

‘I know what fear is like, perhaps,’ said Vesna when he didn’t answer, and for a moment he thought she was talking about him. ‘I know how people smell, when they are afraid. When you are in a room with fourteen people in a house, not knowing whether you will be shot if you come outside?’

Sandro remained silent. This was beyond his experience. ‘When your mother does not return when she’s only gone to buy bread and you go to look for her? You can smell your own sweat, you can’t stop it. She was like that, Flavia Matteo. She was like an animal, so thin under that linen blouse. I could see the sweat on her neck, and I could see her eyes, looking, looking, and her breathing, it was very light and quick.’

The maid exhaled, smoothed the skirt of her overall, her look turned inward, talking in a rush as though all of this had only just come to her, all at once. ‘Her sheets were like the sheets of a child who can’t sleep, a child with a fever. I would have changed them but he does not allow it. Sheets changed every three days, but I only did her room the first morning. After that – it was “Do not disturb”.’ Her eyes flickered.

Sandro held her gaze: there were so many people, so many potential witnesses, it wasn’t worth asking a thing because they didn’t notice anything. But Vesna was different. He took a chance.

‘Do you think she was afraid of – someone? She thought someone might come to find her, someone was looking for her? It might be why she stayed in her room.’ Even as he said this, it didn’t make sense to him. Was she hiding? She got up at dawn to come here, she wasn’t fleeing someone in the street. And she’d been before; this wasn’t after all a random choice.

On the evidence it seemed to Sandro more likely that she had come here to find someone than to escape someone.

Vesna crossed her arms, thinking. Shook her head. ‘It was more like – she was ill. Afraid of something – in her own body, in her own head maybe.’

Was that how post-natal depression manifested itself? Sandro didn’t know, did he? Was what Luisa had experienced post-natal depression? She hadn’t been frightened; she’d been like a dead thing. Again, he didn’t know. He was a man after all.

Vesna went on. ‘And she did come out, that first day.’ She frowned, thinking intently. ‘She didn’t seem afraid to go outside. That wasn’t it. She went into the town.’ She raised her head and blinked.

‘She did? She went for a walk?’ Like me, thought Sandro, an early walk, to clear the head. And suddenly he thought, I’m not here alone, though, am I? Damn. He looked at his watch: eight-thirty. Would Rosselli be awake? Would he wait, patiently, eating breakfast at the hotel, for Sandro to return? Somehow Sandro doubted it: he stood up in sudden impatience.

Vesna looked at him, barely registering his movement. ‘She went out – I thought she was … I thought she needed something, I heard her downstairs asking Calzaghe where to find something. He was giving her directions. I heard him tell her.’

‘Really? Can you remember what she was looking for?’

Slowly Vesna shook her head, still looking up at him like a child. ‘I don’t know. He said – what did she say? Something about, back towards the station. Next to – yes. Next to the
pizzeria
there’s one, he said. But I don’t know one
what.’

‘OK,’ said Sandro, thinking furiously. ‘OK.’

Vesna got up, awkwardly. ‘It’s important, isn’t it?’ she said, biting her lip. ‘I should have said.’ She hugged herself.

‘Calzaghe should have said,’ countered Sandro. ‘Did he – tell the police, I mean? Where’s his mother’s place? I should talk to him.’

The maid looked away, uneasy. ‘I’m sure he didn’t tell them anything,’ she said. ‘He doesn’t like the police. He didn’t want to give them any reason for blaming us – for what happened. He said, Give them the chance and they’ll pin it on us.’ She hesitated. ‘Except he always pins everything on me. His mother’s place is in the hills, behind the station. She’s dead, it’s her old apartment. He goes there – for his leisure time.’ She studied her feet in the ugly rubber clogs.

‘Leisure time,’ said Sandro. ‘Right. Well, I wouldn’t want to disturb him. I can have a look around myself. He directed her to – the
pizzeria
, you said? Towards the station?’

‘I suppose he meant the Venere.’ She looked paler than before. ‘It’s on the way there.’

Almost to himself Sandro said, ‘But there’s the husband. I’ve got to get back to him.’

‘The husband,’ she repeated. ‘I had a husband, once. In Bosnia.’

‘You look too young,’ said Sandro in an attempt at gallantry, wanting to bring colour into her face. He thought, I won’t ask what happened to the husband.

‘It must be terrible for him,’ said Vesna with sudden feeling. ‘For the child. The rejection. The child is not enough to stay alive for?’ Her hand came up to her face again but still Sandro could see no tears.

‘I can go,’ she said abruptly. ‘Why not? There’s nothing for me to do here. What can he do to me? I can go and see what there is next to the
pizzeria.
If you give me your number, I can ring you. Or I can tell you if Calzaghe comes?’

She pulled a battered pink mobile from her pocket, the kind a child might own, and deftly moved her thumb across its keypad. ‘You give me your number, I will call you immediately, and then you’ll have my number?’ She frowned, biting her lip, and Sandro understood that this was not usual for her, this kind of exchange of trust. He repeated his number to her, and felt his phone blip as she dialled it. He took it out and pressed
Reject.

‘OK,’ he said. ‘I have to go.’ But something held him there a minute longer.

The ultimate rejection. Was that what Flavia Matteo had done? Was it rejection or love? Was she hiding or seeking? Was she afraid of herself or another? Vesna stood there in her creased and faded overall with her arms folded tight across her body, holding something in.

She watched him. ‘But she was not a bad woman,’ she said, when he did not make a move to go. ‘She was only afraid.’ He said nothing, but waited.

‘In the bath,’ she said, with a great weariness, and at last he saw it, a gleam at the corner of her eye, the tiny overflow on to her pale cheek but now she did not put a hand up. ‘In the bath, when I found her, she – she was not naked. She put on her underwear. She did not want to be naked, found like that.’

Sandro saw her hands tremble in her lap.

‘It’s nothing,’ she said blankly, as if this small, terrible observation had drained her.

Flavia Matteo was not a bad woman: she was afraid.

‘No,’ said Sandro. ‘It’s not nothing.’

*

When the private investigator had gone, Vesna walked slowly into the back room off the lobby, and between Calzaghe’s cluttered desk and the filing cabinet and the coat rack with his old coats smelling of grease and sweat, she sat down and cried. She cried for about twenty minutes, not worrying about the noise because no one could hear, and then she stopped. There always came a moment, with tears, when you had to stop because you thought, what next? I can’t cry for ever. She stood up, removed her apron and walked out into the sun.

Chapter Sixteen

‘Y
OU TALKED TO HER
?’

The phone bleeped: another call trying to get through. ‘Wanda,’ said Giuli. ‘She’s called Wanda.’ She was in the cloister of the Women’s Centre, pacing. Could she lose her job, skulking like this, trying to get confidential information out of people? Spying. She held the phone away from her face.
Enzo
, it said.
Hold call and answer
?

‘Just a second,’ she said. Then to Enzo, wary,
‘Caro
? Hold on a sec. This won’t take a minute, I’ll call you back.’ He didn’t get a chance to respond before she switched back to Sandro.

‘It’s Enzo,’ she said.

‘Right,’ said Sandro and his voice dropped, despondent. ‘What?’ said Giuli. He liked Enzo, didn’t he?

‘I might have landed him in it,’ said Sandro wearily. ‘The Frazione got broken into last night.’ A heavy sigh. ‘To be honest, I’d forgotten about it. Like a bad dream, you know? The
avvocato
, Bastone, he called me at God knows what time … two in the morning. The police had been, something about computers. I said Enzo’d be the guy to help him get things back to rights. Bastone doesn’t seem to be able to find his own backside with both hands.’

‘Funny, isn’t it?’ said Giuli, softening. ‘You’d go to Enzo with a problem rather than leave it to a lawyer with half a dozen letters after his name.’

‘He’s a good lad,’ said Sandro, reticent as ever. ‘Are we still coming to dinner tomorrow night?’

‘Oh, God,’ said Giuli. She’d forgotten.

‘No problem,’ said Sandro. ‘We can do it another time.’

‘No,’ said Giuli reluctantly. ‘It was Enzo’s idea. I can’t cancel for him, can I?’