Dead Season (15 page)

There’d been no sound from the office – though the door had been closed and perhaps she wouldn’t have heard anything anyway. She had walked slowly around the room, turning on the lights, replenishing the deposit and withdrawal slips, resetting the ticket machine before finally she’d flicked the switches that released the security doors and declared the bank open for the afternoon’s business. What there was of it.

If she’d wanted to see Val shaken, then she had had her wish. Turning from the door, she saw him emerge from Marisa’s office, and his carefully cultivated stubble stood out dark against the pallor of his face.

‘You all right, Val?’ she’d said.

‘What?’

She’d thought he was going to cry, his staring eyes hardly focused on her. Gently she’d put out her hand, touched his arm. ‘It’s a shock,’ she’d said. ‘Take it easy.’

‘He’s dead,’ Valentino had said blankly, and she’d thought, poor guy. Nothing bad had ever happened to Val, he was like a kid encountering death for the first time. Only Val was twenty-nine. She’d felt as if she’d aged ten years herself.

‘Yes,’ she’d said, and he’d took her hand and held on to it, just for a second but very tight. Then someone had appeared at the door: typical. Barely a handful of customers all month, and again some kid was waiting by the door, hopping on white trainers to be let in, looking at his watch.

*

Sweat bloomed, quite suddenly in the humid darkness, at Roxana’s temples, down her spine, the backs of her legs against the plastic of the steamer chair. Was it her imagination, or was it even hotter tonight? And the memory of the day – the awfulness of it, stuck in that airless sweatbox of a bank, trying not to think about Claudio Brunello, even the oblivious customer – that was what had brought her out in a sweat.

It wasn’t an accident
. Marisa had said that sharply, then almost immediately back-pedalled. ‘It sounds – well. Mugged, maybe, out on the
lungarno
near the barracks, the African market.’ She’d looked blank, trying to make sense of any of it. ‘They weren’t saying much according to Irene, she was frantic, of course. She can’t believe it.’

‘What? What?’ It made no sense. None whatsoever. ‘In Florence? But he’s supposed to be on holiday.’

Roxana, thinking back to that stifling office, the air humming with the terrible reverberations of it, kept her eyes closed, and the sounds sharpened. Ma’s singing trailed off as she skipped the words she couldn’t remember, but the cicadas were deafening, sawing with rhythmic relentlessness in the big umbrella pine that marked the end of the garden.

What did Marisa know, really?

‘So someone – do the police think someone did it? What – hit and run?’ Then worse had occurred to her. ‘Murder?’

‘No!’ That had got Marisa up out of her chair. ‘Are you insane?’ She’d put a hand to her chest, the bare tanned triangle of ribcage, not an ounce of spare flesh on her. ‘I don’t know what they think. I – there’s a possibility of suicide.’

And suddenly aware of her position – a mere teller,
sportellista
sitting calmly in the office of her superior – Roxana had stopped asking questions. She’d just bobbed her head, sorry, but she’d rather wished for that small grey man, Sandro Cellini, to ask her questions for her.

There was something Marisa Goldman wasn’t telling.

Eyes still closed, Roxana sat very still. It was almost as though she could feel the overgrown foliage that surrounded her, hear it too, the banana leaves rustling against each other, a dry loquat leaf falling to earth, could smell the overpowering sweetness of orange blossom.

And there was a crack, very close. The sound of something trodden underfoot and with it Roxana’s eyes snapped open, the sweat cooling fast on her forehead.

‘Who’s that?’ She spoke louder than she intended, leaning forward in the lounger, hands braced against the armrests.

From inside Ma’s singing stopped. ‘Roxana?’

Instinctively Roxana put a finger to her lips.

Then Ma was standing on the threshold to the back porch, her face no more than a pale oval in the dark and any trace of the woman singing over her pans gone. Her mouth moved but no sound came out. Roxana seized her hand to still her and they both turned to look into the overgrown garden.

A rustle. Then the great grey Persian from next door lolloped out from under the banana palm, stepping neatly between the dead leaves, leaping noiselessly up on to the terrace. It looked up at them from the rail with unblinking calm, opened its mouth in a single mew.

‘Get away,’ said Violetta Delfino with sudden savagery, leaning across Roxana and shoving the animal off its perch. Landing on all four feet, with silent dignity the Persian stalked away, its feathery tail upright in affront, the last of it to disappear back into the undergrowth. Not a sound.

‘It wasn’t the cat,’ said Ma, defensively. ‘It wasn’t.’

And Roxana knew she wasn’t just talking about tonight. Could that ball of fluff, which could turn the right way up in mid-air and land without disturbing a leaf, have snapped a twig? Could Ma have spent all yesterday afternoon hiding from a cat?

‘Mamma,’ she said, concentrating very hard on keeping her tone steady, reasonable. ‘You know Babbo’s torch? You remember where he kept it?’

Slowly the dark eyes came into focus, fixed on her and Violetta Delfino nodded.

‘Bring it to me.’

In the few moments she was alone again on the porch, Roxana’s every sense was alert, tensed against panic. Would she know whether there was someone there, if that someone didn’t move a muscle? The cicadas scraped on like buzzsaws in the umbrella pine. Mamma was back, pressing the torch into her hand with trembling fingers.

‘Go inside now, Ma,’ instructed Roxana, but her mother didn’t move. ‘Not because there’s anything to be afraid of,’ she said, as briskly as she could.

Ma stared fiercely into her eyes, as she had when demanding the truth of her as a child,
Tell me. Tell me you didn’t stick your finger in the pie
. Even though everyone but Ma knew, it had been Luca who couldn’t wait for dinnertime. She felt a sudden little surge of irritable love for her greedy, charming younger brother, a thousand kilometres away under a rainy sky, living it up in a grey northern city while they bickered their lives away.

‘There’s no one there,’ she said patiently, and even believed it. ‘I’m going to make sure the back gate’s closed.’ Fished the small rape alarm whistle from her bag and brandished it. ‘You’ll know if I need you.’ Smiling to show it was a joke. Mostly.

And at last, with an angry sigh, Ma gave in. ‘The dinner’ll be cold,’ she said.

‘Five minutes,’ said Roxana. The porch door closed behind Violetta, and Roxana got to her feet.

The wooden stairs down into the garden were rickety, at every step a loud creak, but her noisy movements provoked no answering sound from the undergrowth.
There’s no one there
.

It wasn’t completely dark. There was a distant glow from the tennis court floodlights a kilometre away, a square of slatted bedroom lamplight from next door, through closed shutters. But as she moved under the great drooping leaves of the banana palm, Roxana turned on the torch, and cursed. God knew when the batteries had last been replaced; it shone with a feeble yellow beam, hardly enough to illuminate her own hand.

Never mind. She switched the torch off, got out the battery and rubbed it between her hands, leaned against the palm trunk, and listened. She could hear the sluggish gurgle of the river, from here, and something else, something dripping. And she thought. Ma had said that yesterday he had come around the back of the house. But that wasn’t straightforward. The side door was kept locked. The back gate could be accessed only by an overgrown footpath, and you had to go to the end of the street, round the houses, scout around a bit. She’d have said, you’d have to know the area.

The man had called her Signora Delfino, but if he’d known her, Ma would have recognized his voice.

You’d have to know the area – or be determined. Desperate, perhaps.

Roxana sighed involuntarily: was she really taking this seriously? It would seem that she was. Twenty-four hours ago she’d assumed that Ma had imagined the whole thing. But a great deal had happened in twenty-four hours, a great deal that was no one’s imagination. Brunello was dead, his kids were fatherless. Still something dripped in the undergrowth, nagging at her.

She replaced the battery in the torch, turned it back on. The garden was no more than ten metres square, even if it felt like a full-sized jungle in the dark. This was where Roxana had grown up, hide and seek among what had then been stunted shrubs, waist high. The back gate, set in a two-metre fence, had always been kept locked, Ma terrified they’d find their way down to the river and drown. In half a metre of filthy water: it had been known. And an eight-year-old girl had been abducted from the local swimming pool, when Roxana had been twelve, found dead in the river thirty kilometres away a week later. Never, never, never talk to strangers, Ma had scolded, then when it turned out the killer had known his victim, Ma had gone silent and obdurate.

In the dark Roxana moved towards the back gate, knowing she would find it locked and bolted as always and then she could switch off the torch and go inside. Eat dinner and try not to think about Claudio Brunello. As she pushed under the oleander – poisonous, Ma had told them all, over and over, don’t even touch it – the dripping was there, louder. It was getting on her nerves, and – ugh. Something squelched underfoot, boggy, wet overrunning her sandals, mud between her toes. Damn. The torch swayed in her hand, and the feeble beam lit up the garden tap, in the back corner, set against the fence. Dripping. A puddle had formed at the base of the pipe. Roxana sighed; removing her sandals, she stepped gingerly around the water and turned the tap to close it tightly.

Tentatively she tested the only ordinary explanation out for size: Ma had been watering the plants. Well, she could ask, though she was fairly sure Ma had not watered anything since Dad’s death, which was why half the terracotta pots contained only desiccated twigs.

Had the tap somehow loosened itself? It seemed unlikely, despite the regular fluctuations in water pressure. Or were the next-door neighbours, what, climbing over the fence and stealing water? But as Roxana tried hard to restrict herself to only the most innocuous possibilities, almost despite herself she raised the torch beam so that it shone weakly along the now damp leaf mould at the foot of the fence, nearly, but not quite, reaching the back gate.

What was that?

She kneeled, and the movement seemed to alter some connection in the torch because it blinked and faded, before strengthening again, suddenly too bright. Bright enough for her to see what it was that had caught her eye: some regular, familiar indentations in the damp soil.

Footprints.

They ran along under the fence, a walking pace, even weight distribution, Roxana would have said, as if she knew anything at all about the analysis of prints.
The police
– she considered them briefly, then dismissed the possibility. The police might know about footprints, although she wouldn’t have credited any of the ones she’d come across with knowing more about anything than she did. They might have whole labs of technicians, but none of them would be sent out to investigate a nervous old woman’s fear of strangers, the dark, loneliness.

The steps stopped, feet planted perhaps ten centimetres apart, the impressions deeper, as if he’d stood here a while.

He?

The footsteps were not large for a man’s. But too big to be a woman’s, too wide, too deeply set. A heavy woman with big feet? She could picture no such person; next door was a widow built like a bird. A woman Violetta resented, more experienced in her widowhood, not much heavier than her Persian cat, always pacing and hurrying herself into emaciation, never sitting still long enough to eat. Roxana sat back on her haunches in the warm damp, and shone the torch back towards the house. It was still ominously bright. It would die on her, any minute.

As her eyes adjusted, she could see the slatted rectangle of the
salotto
’s French doors, a square of light from the upstairs bathroom. A man could stand here and observe.

He’d gone closer to the house, this man with modestly sized feet: a couple more steps then he’d stopped again, and looked. He had called out to Ma,
I know you’re in there, Signora Delfino
.

There was something about that phrase. Had Ma just – made that up, unconsciously? Given a voice to the man and his intentions, turned him into a bogeyman, repeated a line from a story to frighten children,
Little pig, little pig, let me come in?
Might he, after all, have been a perfectly innocent delivery man?

He had not come right up to the house; he had stopped. Something occurred to Roxana and she stood, quickly, and before the torch could expire, turned and took her own, hurried, smaller, lighter steps back to where she’d come, only a few metres to the left, to the fence, along the fence—

To the gate. Which was not locked and bolted, as she had last seen it, as it had been for as long as she could remember, but hung just ajar, crippled and askew with one hinge right off. And the casing that retained the bolt was barely hanging from screws torn out of the soft and rotten wood.

Don’t tell Ma
, was what ran through her head, as though she and her naughty brother were whispering together in the dark. It might have been an accident. But as she stared, Roxana took in the violence of it, the split and torn wood. This was no accident.

With a last flicker, the torch died.

C
HAPTER
E
LEVEN

D
AMN
,
THOUGHT
S
ANDRO
.
D
AMN
.
The bank. I forgot to go to the bank
.

He was sitting at the kitchen table, immobile in the heat; he even wished they could turn off the low-hanging light in its stained-glass,
stile liberty
shade. The coloured glow through the glass seemed to be giving out heat.