The Drowning River (15 page)

‘OK, OK,’ he said, ‘I think we need to take this slowly.’ And Iris sat down, Falco sat back down, and Massi retreated to the doorway.

Laboriously Iris began to explain.

Falco didn’t seem particularly convinced by her clues – the computer, the window. He shrugged. She took the man through the flat, pointing out what she had seen; he made notes, occasionally scratching his head. In the doorway to Ronnie’s room he stopped, looking around, peering inside the open wardrobe and as she followed his gaze Iris’s excitement ebbed.

She’d had it in her head that Ronnie had met someone, was just taking off somewhere with some new man, and what she’d have come back for would be to pick up some more clothes. It had all seemed to slip into place, a non-nightmare scenario, Serena right all along, and Ronnie loved her clothes, it’d be just like her to pack a few bits – a capsule wardrobe, ha – and decide she needed more. The only problem was, they were all still there, the dresses hanging in the massive dark wardrobe, the stack of jeans on the shelves, the favourite purple cashmere sweater.

‘Her passport?’ the carabiniere asked.
‘Documenti?’

Iris thought; where did Ronnie keep stuff like that? Her own were all together in an elastic band, health card, passport, driving licence, house keys for France, stowed carefully underneath a book in the bedside drawer. She frowned, thinking. Trying to visualize the last time she’d seen Ronnie do anything with her passport.

‘It was not in the handbag,’ said Falco, interrupting her train of thought. ‘Did she keep it on her person usually? In this country you have to carry the documents with you.’ His expression was one of unsmiling reproof.

‘We tell them at the beginning of the course,’ Massi said wearily.

‘Ronnie wasn’t used to that,’ Iris apologized, to both of them. ‘We don’t have to do it in England.’ She averted her gaze from Falco’s look of faint disdain and tried to get back to Ronnie.

The hall table, the drawer, yes. She went into the hall with Falco close behind her, pulled open the drawer, and as she opened it and saw the NHS card she knew she’d been right; this was where she’d seen Ronnie stash the small maroon and gold booklet, saying she didn’t care, it was going to get nicked if she took it in her handbag everywhere she went. Yes.

Only it wasn’t there this time.

‘Oh,’ said Iris. ‘This was where she kept it.’ She felt a glimmer of hope. ‘She must have it with her.’

Massi nodded briskly, agreeing with her, and she was grateful.

Falco just gave them both that impassive stare; Iris was getting used to it. Bored scepticism, to cover for the fact that he didn’t have any answers either. Saying nothing, he crossed over to the computer, bent to stare at the dark screen and clicked his tongue in exasperation, leaned around the back and before Iris could say ‘Don’t!’ he stuck the cable back in and stabbed a finger at the start button. Behind her in the doorway Paolo Massi’s sharp intake of breath echoed her disbelief and she turned.

‘But what if – ? There could have been fingerprints!’ she said, seeing the dismay in his face, knowing she was just guessing, that she knew nothing about it. ‘Couldn’t there?’ Massi shook his head helplessly, looking past her at the policeman, and the computer screen, which remained resolutely blank.

The carabiniere looked back at them, unconcerned.

‘I’ll take it back to the office,’ he said in Italian. ‘We can get it working, we have computer guys who can rescue anything. Clearly we have to examine her emails, that kind of thing.’

‘MySpace,’ said Iris faintly. ‘She had a MySpace page.’

‘Of course,’ said the carabiniere, but his haughty look didn’t convince her he knew what she was talking about.

‘Will you examine the apartment?’ she said, and he made a gesture of ambivalence with his hands. ‘Eventually,’ he said. ‘But I think if there
was anything of interest – you would have seen it, yes?’ She nodded uncertainly.

‘Can I stay here?’

He looked at her curiously. ‘Of course,’ he said. ‘If you want.’ He sighed. ‘Signorina March,’ he said, ‘perhaps we were hasty. We don’t know yet that anything wrong has happened, do we? There is nothing in the Boboli, no sign of – ah, violence. No-thing. The Signorina Hutton – ’ he pronounced it ’Utton ‘ – she is legally adult, yes? Adults disappear quite often, and then they reappear, she has her passport.’ He shrugged.

Iris stood as obstinate as a child in front of him, her lips compressed. She knew when she was being told to stay out of something. She knew he’d looked around at the way they lived – slatternly, careless English tourists – and had made assumptions.

‘But she lost her bag,’ she said stubbornly. ‘Or her bag was stolen. She would need money.’ She saw the policeman’s expression darken, and felt Massi’s hand on her arm, touching her lightly.

‘Iris,’ he said, ‘you will not get anywhere like that.’ She opened her mouth to protest but between the two of them, outnumbered and alien, she suddenly felt like bursting into tears, or screaming.
Find her.

‘OK,’ she said, squeezing her eyes shut so neither of them would see.

Massi saw the policeman to the door, the computer under his arm in the same kind of zipped plastic evidence bag they’d had Ronnie’s handbag in when they’d come into the school. In the
salotto
Iris slumped onto the prickly horsehair sofa.

‘Do you think he’s right?’ she asked fiercely of Paolo Massi when he came back in. He looked pale; he turned his hands palms up, renouncing responsibility. ‘I don’t know,’ he said, shaking his head. Iris felt like stamping her foot, sick of this fatalism crap, all this what will be, will be stuff.

‘There is no point in assuming the worst, Iris,’ Massi said haltingly. ‘Try not to worry. We’ll find her. We will.’ He considered her for a moment, standing over her. ‘Are you hungry? Come back and meet my wife.’ She stared at him; she wasn’t hungry at all. She looked at her
watch: twelve. His voice was gentle. Suddenly Iris didn’t want to be alone here, for all her acting tough, and she had two hours.

‘I’m seeing Jackson this afternoon,’ she said, and Paolo tilted his head back, looking at the ceiling.

‘I wonder,’ he said. ‘I wonder about that boy. Do you think he knows anything about this?’

Iris stared at the floor. Jackson had sounded scared; what did that mean? That he did know something?

‘I doubt it,’ she said, not knowing why but wanting to do this on her own. Even if it wasn’t safe, she wanted to do it.

‘Come along,’ said Paolo, a hand on her shoulder. ‘My wife has made you some lunch.’

In the palm-filled courtyard the Contessa Badigliani was lying in wait for them, hair stiff as auburn candyfloss. She greeted Paolo Massi with elaborate surprise, holding out a hand covered in ornate rings, started going on in hushed Italian, something about how well his wife was looking.

They all know each other, thought Iris, not wanting to be so English and suspicious, but suspicious all the same. We’re their meal ticket, aren’t we? Do they like us at all? Now she was on the subject of Ronnie, and glaring at Iris as she spoke.

‘I’m very worried,’ the contessa said, wringing her hands rather theatrically, but she didn’t sound it; she sounded cross. ‘What has she done, this girl? Where has she gone?’

Massi said something soothing, but the contessa was having none of it; she threw up her hands, muttering about the mother, the police, dreadful to have the police on one’s doorstep and she wouldn’t deal with them. She had clearly waited until the carabiniere was off the premises before emerging from her apartments. When Iris and Ronnie had arrived, she had explained to them that she liked the ground-floor rooms for their coolness in the summer, and their access to the garden for her little dog; behind her, through the door, Iris could see only deep gloom, and caught a whiff of damp. She felt a twinge of something like pity, an emotion she knew would enrage the contessa even further were she to express it.

In a sentence full of the usual formalities and courtesies, Massi murmured again and she turned away from them then, their cue to escape.

He had taken her to the car parked illegally on the piazza; it was at least fifteen years old, a dirty gold colour and surprisingly messy, piles of papers sliding off the back seat.

‘I’m sorry,’ said Massi, ‘my wife’s car.’ He smiled stiffly. ‘I don’t have one any more; bad for the nerves, in this city.’ It was months since she’d been in a car, Iris realized; it was weird. She’d forgotten what a confined space a car was. The rain was still coming down relentlessly, the elderly windscreen wipers flogging back and forwards as they drove through the big boulevards of the northern city, unfamiliar to Iris.

The apartment was just beyond a railway line where the road went up, he said, to Fiesole, although the sodden cloud hung so low you could see nothing beyond the roof of the apartment block. It was a solid building, not ancient, not new; Iris settled on
fin de siècle
because it had solid stone detailing around the windows, and balustraded balconies, though what did it matter? She hoped no one judged her and Ma by the terrible architect’s terrible concrete house.

‘Why do you live here?’ she asked as they entered a tiny, flimsy-looking lift, hoping she didn’t sound rude; it was so anonymous, the wide and beautiful city all stretched out to the south of them, and Massi lived here. Massi looked at her, refusing to be offended, she thought; he smiled.

‘It’s a very popular area,’ he said. ‘Good for families.’ The lift shrieked as if prompted, and jerked them upwards. ‘Cool in the summer; we have to be practical, you see. Living here all year.’

Unlike you foreigners, he meant; by the time the hot summer came, Iris would be long gone.

The door opened before them; they must have been expected, thought Iris, but before she could think anything else, a dark-haired woman was on top of her on the threshold, long, thin, cool fingers stroking her cheek, amidst an outpouring of exclamations and endearments in Italian.

‘Anna, Anna,’ said Paolo behind her. And then they were inside and the door shut behind them.

Massi’s wife stepped back at last and put a hand to Iris’s cheek. ‘Poor child,’ she said, in Italian. ‘Poor child,’ and Iris retreated in alarm.

‘Anna,’ said Paolo again, and then, to Iris, ‘My wife does speak very good English, actually. She’s just very – emotional. She can only be emotional in Italian.’ He said something in Italian to his wife then, something like, Don’t. You’ll worry her.

‘It’s all right,’ said Iris, not knowing what else to say. Not surprising he kept his wife away from the school; she would certainly be a distraction. She looked around; the place was big and dark, like the Piazza d’Azeglio; it seemed wrong to her, she still couldn’t understand a country where there was so much sun you needed to shut it out. Not today, though; through a tall curtained window she could see the rain gusting. It was only early afternoon but there were several lamps lit inside.

Anna Massi put a hand back to Iris’s cheek again, and smiled. There was something unusual about her that Iris couldn’t quite pin down; her hair was very black, but her skin was pale and she seemed delicate, in an old-fashioned sort of way. Even her clothes were old-fashioned, particularly for an Italian; she was wearing a woollen skirt that might have belonged to her mother.

‘Sit, sit,’ said Anna Massi, gesturing at the sofa before abruptly turning away to stare moodily out of the window. ‘O
dio,
this weather,’ she said, flinging her arms around herself. ‘The rain! Like the apocalypse, the global warming, don’t you think?’

Iris kept quiet. ‘Even Sicily,’ Anna Massi went on, shooting a reproachful glance at her husband from the window. ‘They say it’s even cold down there.’

Paolo Massi grunted; looking from him to his wife, Iris thought he seemed quite different in her presence. It was strange to think of her own sudden self-consciousness with him, all that time ago, a whole twenty-four hours. Yesterday morning, when all she’d worried about was being told off for Ronnie not being there.

Anna Massi turned back to Iris, smiling. ‘One can sometimes swim in Sicily at this time of year, the sea still warm, you know.’ Iris nodded warily. ‘Of course, I have too much to keep me busy here. Last week I
accompanied pilgrims to a shrine near Treviso; imagine! The study of religions is my passion, not only Christianity, you understand. Also the ancients, Thebes, Peru. . .’ She clasped her hands together at her breast. ‘My passion.’ Iris stared; she was a weird woman all right.

‘She’s lovely, isn’t she?’ Anna Massi went on to her husband in Italian, still smiling at Iris. ‘Like a Botticelli, don’t you think?’ Massi did a funny thing of tilting his head back and looking at the ceiling, while Iris pretended not to understand, but as the blush rose inexorably to her cheeks she thought, It’s OK. She’s being kind.

The food had not been what she had expected, just like the apartment, just like Massi’s odd wife; some meat, roasted to dryness, stewed vegetables, a jug of water. It was elaborate without being organized, as if Anna Massi actually had no idea how to cook at all. Iris told herself off; had she really thought that all Italians lived in picturesque old buildings and made their own pasta? They talked about nothing much, chewing their way through the tasteless food; they avoided the subject of Ronnie completely, as if Iris were a small child that needed to be protected.

‘Are you enjoying the drawing course?’ Anna Massi asked. ‘Paolo tells me you’re very talented.’ Startled, Iris stared at him, fork in midair, then blushed, again. ‘I don’t think so,’ she mumbled.

‘Iris,’ said Paolo Massi wearily. ‘Don’t be ridiculous. You must know you’re good.’

Iris thought of the drawing of Ronnie that Antonella had put up on the wall of the studio. ‘Well, I am enjoying the course, yes,’ she said, cautiously.

‘You English are strange,’ said Paolo Massi. ‘So unlike the Americans. They never have a problem believing in themselves.’ He seemed tired, suddenly, forking the food into his mouth without enthusiasm. Iris looked from him to his wife, feeling inexplicably sorry for him.

‘Thank God for the Americans,’ said Anna Massi, blithely. ‘Look what a success the school has been, thanks to them. The gallery, the exhibitions – well. Aren’t they what really made the difference, these last ten years?’ She leaned across the table and took Iris’s hand, impulsively. ‘Oh, dear, you aren’t offended, are you? It’s just that the
Americans have the money – and there are so many of them.’ And she laughed; Iris joined in, not very convincingly, and Paolo Massi remained uncomfortably silent.