The Drowning River (12 page)

The man with the comic book – or boy, it seemed from this close, although that might be the result of retardation; it could leave a grown man’s features looking smoothed out like this – peered at the photograph, peered at his watch. He moved his head with a bobbing motion, then jerked it back and raised the soggy pages of his book even closer to his face, to blot Sandro out.

Sandro gave it ten minutes, standing there in the rain, talking at first but then just waiting. They ignored him stolidly and eventually he didn’t know what else to do but turn away. He turned back. He fished
a card out of his pocket and with a sense of futility held it out to the young man, the only one of the three offering him any hope as a witness. Without looking him in the eye, the boy snatched the card and carefully inserted it into an already stuffed wallet; as he did so, Sandro glimpsed perhaps thirty business cards: a pizza delivery service, a leather-goods shop, an optician’s. And his own; Sandro Cellini, Investigations.

He walked on until he came to an opening where the wire had been torn back, and put his head through. Below the parapet was an uneven scramble down to a wide path that ran by the water’s edge. Claudio Gentileschi had been eighty-one, even if he’d been fit for his age; might he have fallen, might he have gone in? After the filth of the children’s playground the bank looked almost inviting; it was green with a mixture of grass and the invasive, alien plants that had colonized the edge of the water in the city, bamboo thickets and horsetail. Claudio Gentileschi could have fallen, Sandro supposed, but he would have had to roll a long way to end up in the water and the bank looked soft, with waterlogged red earth showing through the grass. It had happened here.

He turned to look along the embankment at the windows; who else might have seen? In the city, there’s always someone who knows, who sees you.

The other side of the playground there was a run-down
ambulatorio,
some dull modern apartment buildings with balconies, then a row of older houses overlooking the river; none of their occupants would have seen down to the bank. The housing was all low-rise, anonymous and modest; on the other side of the river, the grand baroque facades seemed to stare it down with contempt.

It was the wrong time of year, anyway, for hanging out of your window and having a look at anything; certainly a good half of the shutters were closed today, close to lunchtime, as if it was just too grey, and the view of the river filling up with rain was just too dismal. Pietro had been right; this was a dead place.

There was a bar, though, set among the older houses; there was always a bar. The Cestello, named after the church. It looked like it did some business, too; Sandro turned to inspect it from a distance, his back against the parapet. The two big windows were misted with
activity, a couple of dozen heads inside at least. Out on the pavement was a planking deck for summer drinking, empty of chairs now and the wood slick with rain. The scalloped edge of the awning, rolled in against the facade, flapped forlornly.

For a second Sandro felt again that shiver of reluctance at the thought of stepping up to the place and asking questions without the talisman of his badge to hold up ahead of him. It was at that moment that the rain, temporarily forgotten, chose to make its presence felt again; a gust blew the umbrella up and inside out, and it collapsed messily and irrevocably, a tangle of cheap metal and dripping fabric in his face.

‘Merda,’
muttered Sandro, because suddenly everything was wet, his shoulders, his thighs, even up his sleeve. With disgust he strode across the street, dumped the malign object in an already full litter bin and pushed open the door of the Caffe Il Cestello.

It was so warm and marvellously stuffy inside that Sandro managed immediately to forget that he was here to ask questions; his nostrils filled with the mingling odours of warm pastries and coffee and lunch. He made his way to the bar, where a glass cabinet contained sandwiches, cold plates of ham and mozzarella and some long roasting tins heaped up with prepared pasta, all’amatriciana; with spinach; with capers and tuna. This was where he should have been coming to get his lunch; Sandro calculated the distance between the river and his office and decided it was just right for a midday constitutional. On a dry day.

Clearly it was too busy to ask questions; the proprietor was running from one end of the long zinc bar to the other, arms raised to point at heads, to take the next order. Sandro waited his turn, ordered a plate of penne all’arrabbiata, and took it to a small table by the door that was miraculously empty. He looked around for a paper but there were none; only when he sat down did Sandro realize that he’d managed to abscond with the copy of
La Nazione
he’d started to look at in the bar in the Via dei Pilastri. Stuffed in his pocket, and damp but not actually disintegrating; things were looking up. With care he extracted the soggy newspaper from his jacket and unfolded it on the table.

The penne were delicious, hot with just the right amount of chilli and garlic, a good, oily long-cooked tomato sauce, plenty of parsley chopped nice and fine and fresh. Sandro savoured the dish, turning the pages, passing the report of the Uffizi rape. They had the man, still working bold as brass, as if he hadn’t even thought he’d done anything wrong. Thought, maybe, that an immigrant girl, a Romanian or Latvian or whatever she was, would be too cowed to make a complaint. Hardly even thought of her as human, perhaps; that was common enough among psychopaths.

As he chewed, the burn of the chilli in his mouth joining forces with a simmering outrage, Sandro reflected that people thought of psychopaths as big characters, Hannibal Lecter types, evil geniuses, but Sandro had seen enough of them to know different. They could be smart, but some could be very stupid indeed; they were characterized by a lack, by something missing in the whirring, complicated brain, a cog gone, a reservoir emptied. Disinhibition, lack of conscience, amorality, there were names for it. Sandro thought of the
autopsia
on Gentileschi. The lesions on the brain in that big domed head.

He turned the page again, mechanically, and the picture jumped out at him, just like that. The girl.

Mesmerized, Sandro stared; how could he be sure, people might say, but he was. She stared out at him from the page in some photo-booth picture, long dark hair parted in the middle and streaked blonde down one side, pale northern skin bleached paler by the flash. There was the ghost of an insolent smile on her face as she stared back at whatever authorities had required her to take the picture.

He scanned the story, the headline, the secondary photograph of some personal effects, laid out on an evidence table, handbag, wallet, women’s stuff.
Girl student missing since
– Tuesday. A student of the Scuola Massi in San Niccolò; at the school’s name something chimed, far off, in Sandro’s policeman’s memory, but was silenced by a more immediate piece of information he had on the girl in this picture.

Because this was the girl he’d seen walking down the Via del Leone on Tuesday morning, which in turn was the same Tuesday that was the last day of Claudio Gentileschi’s life.

Around him the bar seemed to have emptied suddenly.

Gently Sandro laid the newspaper down and stared without seeing at the rain-spattered glass. Why should there be a link? There was no connection between Claudio Gentileschi and this girl, this Veronica Hutton. No connection. He turned the paper over, her face down.

Of course there was no one there. Of course not.

Iris dumped her bag in the dark, chilly hall and walked from room to room, turning on lights.

The apartment’s lighting had always been as frustratingly unusable as the furniture; ancient standard lamps with frayed cloth-covered wire; huge, dusty chandeliers, half of them non-functioning, the other half fitted with low-wattage, energy-saving bulbs that barely illuminated anything. But as she moved through the place in that unnerving draught, this morning Iris found the dimness more than just annoying; it made her uneasy. Actually, it frightened her.

As the clutter of the long
salotto
emerged in the half-light thrown by the only two functioning candle-bulbs on the chandelier – the prickly sofa with wooden arms, the console tables topped with black marble, the huge gilded mirror – Iris found where the draught was coming from. She must have left one of the long windows ajar; she opened it fully, pushed back the shutters to let more light in, then yanked the window tight closed on the inside. She stood there a moment, looking out, trying to work out what was different. Same synagogue, same black ivy, same statues. But something was different.

Slowly Iris turned away from the view, trying to resist the creeping claustrophobia of the room, damask curtains and the heavy furniture around her. The flocked walls and the heavy-framed portrait that hung over the red marble fireplace, a jarringly modern – well, 1950s – study of their landlady. Iris felt a moment of panic, because how on earth could she go on living here without Ronnie? Even supposing – and she stopped right there. Even supposing they find her? Even supposing she’s OK?

Iris stood very still, waiting for the panic to pass. Why had she wanted to come back here? She had wanted to look around, in peace. She waited, listening; she could hear the roar of the traffic around the Piazza d’Azeglio, and the conversations of birds in the garden, but the flat was silent, just as it had been yesterday morning. She was alone.

Iris knew she should look in Ronnie’s room but somehow she didn’t feel quite ready for it. A cup of tea, she thought, procrastinating.

In the kitchen she set the kettle on the elderly cast-iron cooker, checked the milk in the fridge. She even stood there a minute or two, looking at the fridge’s contents for hidden significance; Ronnie’s yoghurts, a piece of waxy-looking pecorino half out of its paper, three bottles of prosecco, an open bottle of champagne with a teaspoon in the neck. How long had that been there? She closed the fridge slowly, thoughtfully, set her back against the door, looking at the long stone drainer. Two shallow champagne glasses etched with a Greek key design from the cabinet in the
salotto
stood there upside down, dry inside.

It was doing something to her head, all this. Iris really couldn’t remember if the glasses had been there on Tuesday morning, there was a kind of buzz between her ears, as of static, that stopped her thinking straight; panic, it’d be panic. She breathed carefully, in and out, and her head cleared, just a bit. Yes; she’d washed them up herself, on Tuesday evening. She remembered because she’d thought they’d found everything on Monday night, clearing up after the party. Ronnie’d been in a good mood at the end of it, a bit pissed, singing, wearing her little mask as she carried glasses in ten at a time while Iris washed.

They’d talked; what had they talked about? The boy who’d called her fat.

‘You heard what he said, didn’t you?’ Ronnie had said, rough but anxious. ‘Don’t worry about it. He’s just a pig.’ She set down another load of glasses, extracting her long fingers. ‘So many boys are.’

And then on Tuesday night Iris had found the two champagne glasses in the sink and had wondered how she’d missed them.

The party had been a disaster, hadn’t it? The Halloween party. A random bunch of people, hangers-on, liggers, half of them hardly knew Ronnie at all, yet she’d still spent fifty euros on wine and crisps. But she’d been perfectly cheerful; she’d been happy, bringing in the glasses. She hadn’t spent all evening buried in some guy’s neck on the sofa, but she hadn’t drunk herself stupid out of disappointment as a result, as she would have done at school. Had she grown up since then? No; Iris would have said definitely, not a lot. Why had she been so serene, singing to herself as she brought the glasses in to the kitchen?

Behind Iris the kettle whistled; tea bag, milk, chipped cup – all the grand crockery seemed chipped – and before she could find another reason not to, Iris walked out of the kitchen and through the dark red and black hall to Ronnie’s room. She stood in the doorway, hands warming around the tea, looking. Not wanting to walk in and change things, as if it was the crime scene, right here. Because something was different and she was going to stand here until she worked out what it was.

It was like that game, Pelmanism, or whatever, remembering objects on a tray. Eye mask, Tampax, a book with its spine cracked on the floor, bed unmade. Knickers, two pairs.

The shutters were folded back; she couldn’t remember doing it, but maybe she had. The room must have been light, because she’d looked around, so maybe she had. A stack of school materials on the desk, leaflets for the studio, the school, the gallery where eventually their work might go on show, if it could be sold. Iris felt like crying at the thought of that, Ronnie’s little drawings, her sketchbooks. She picked one up and went through it; to her surprise it was full of drawings, and so was the one below it; Ronnie’d been working, after all. Pages and pages of architectural detail, railings, stone lintels, escutcheons, eaves; another with anatomical sections, stuffed birds. Homework.

Next to the pile was the computer; Iris blinked. Ronnie’s laptop was turned off.

Iris felt the tea going cold in her hands, and she set the mug down
on the floor, at her feet. Tentatively she stepped into the room, trying not to disturb anything. She stared at the laptop, its little row of lights all extinct; the battery was dead, which meant. . . She leaned around the back, trying not to touch it, and saw that the mains cable was not plugged in. She frowned. She didn’t know how long a battery lasted but she’d be willing to bet it didn’t last four days, so the thing must have been plugged in yesterday morning.

Iris thought of Ronnie’s MySpace, the messages she’d scrolled down to find; had there been a message from someone who meant her harm? Tart, someone had called her; Iris had assumed it was a joke. Had there been any clue to where she planned to go, and who with? Because there would be a someone; Ronnie didn’t like to be on her own, everyone knew that, there was always a gang, or a man, or at a pinch there was Iris. Not this time. She rubbed her eyes.