The Drowning River (16 page)

Would the Americans go on coming? wondered Iris. Was he worried, not just about Ronnie, but about the effect on the school? And immediately she felt ashamed; of course he was just worried about Ronnie. And, anyway, she thought stoutly, what’s she talking about? There were only a couple of Americans on the course, and the studio could hardly be that much of a moneyspinner; it couldn’t be down to Ronnie disappearing if the whole thing died a death. She thought Massi’s wife was rather peculiar and naïve, in fact, with her faith in the Americans, with her faith in the school.

After they’d eaten – and none of them ate much – and drunk some tiny cups of bitter coffee, Anna Massi had leapt up. ‘Would you like to see the apartment?’ she asked Iris, recovering some of her English. Taken aback, Iris agreed, and found herself led through the place, shown every corner of the big dark sitting room, which turned out to be full of ornaments, candles and mobiles and pieces of pottery – ‘Anna likes to encourage artisans,’ Paolo Massi had said wryly, and Iris had just nodded, thinking, some of them maybe shouldn’t have been encouraged. Worse than some of the stuff Ma’s friends in Provence produced; far worse.

A big double bedroom with dark, heavy, furniture – ‘From my family,’ Anna said haughtily – a completely ordinary bathroom with toothpaste stains in the sink and mismatched towels. Iris wondered if they thought all English people were obsessively interested in other people’s houses, or if they just didn’t know what to do with her. A small, white-painted room, with a single bed with a crucifix on the wall behind it and a big picture of Padre Pio or someone like him over a chest of drawers with more candles underneath it, like a little shrine. Iris had backed out of that room, but not before she had seen a nightdress folded neatly on the pillow and had understood that this was where Anna Massi slept. ‘My back,’ said Anna by way of explanation, before Iris could forestall her. She put a hand to the base of her spine and grimaced. ‘I need the hard bed.’

Oh, God, thought Iris; what am I doing here?

‘I think I’d better get off, now,’ she said hastily, when they came back into the
salotto
where Paolo Massi looked up at them from his newspaper, tired and nervous. ‘Really?’ he said, looking at his watch. ‘When are you – I’ll take you, yes?’ He glanced at the window; it was grey and gloomy for early afternoon, but the rain seemed to have eased.

‘No,’ said Iris quickly. ‘I mean, thanks very much, but you’ve helped enough, the lunch, looking after me and everything. . .’ Massi and his wife both protested at once, arguing with her, arguing with each other, but Iris held firm. She shouldered her bag and moved towards the door.

‘Look, no, it’s absolutely fine,’ she said. ‘I have bus tickets, it’s stopped raining – well almost,’ reaching behind her for the door, suddenly desperate.

She managed to confer a hurried kiss on Anna Massi’s outstretched cheek and to avoid actually being rude in her haste, but once the door was shut behind her Iris fairly flew down the dank stairwell, dodging the claustrophobic lift and not even really taking a breath until she was out on the street with the beautiful cool rain falling on her cheeks and the fresh air in her lungs.

In less than a minute a bus lumbered towards her on the wide anonymous street, and climbing aboard it with ridiculous gratitude, like a child running out of a detention, Iris made her escape.

Sandro Had Spoken To the mother.

Serena Hutton; the woman was a ballbreaker from hell. Christ only knew how much it had cost when she called him from Dubai on his mobile, as he made his way across from the Lungarno Santa Rosa towards the Carabinieri station. The Via della Chiesa had been too narrow for the delivery van to avoid splashing him, and as Sandro jumped back with the phone clamped to his ear, just too late, pressing himself against the damp plaster of the nearest wall, he had felt the filthy gutter water seep into his trouser bottoms, his socks, his shoes. Not that it made any difference by that stage; Sandro’s morale was not high.

It was the thing he’d dreaded when he went private, the way she’d talked to him, issuing instructions as though he was a dog she was training. Even as a police officer, of course, people sometimes seemed rude in their distress, but this was different; this didn’t look like anguish to Sandro. Serena Hutton had said she should be able to get to Florence some time the following week, Monday or Tuesday; he supposed that there was in fact nothing she could do, but still. Three more days, not knowing? Was it normal, in England, to shrug off your children this way?

She had barked instructions at him, bits of information, telephone numbers; in his pocket Sandro had the newspaper report so he was able to respond, he knew where Veronica Hutton had been studying, her age, he had a photograph.

‘Has she done this sort of thing before?’ he asked, ‘Is this like her?’ and immediately regretted it. A torrent of recriminations followed in botched Italian concerning the girl’s school and their irresponsibility, from which he gathered that Veronica – Ronnie, the mother called her – had absconded from her boarding school for a weekend on one occasion. He further gathered that the mother had not actually lived with her daughter for more than a week since the girl was sixteen, what with school and holidays with wealthy friends here there and everywhere, and in fact she didn’t know if it was like her at all.

‘Look,’ she said in English, ‘I don’t want any investigation; I’m not paying for any investigation. I’ve spent enough on that girl. She’ll turn up. I just – well. The police seem to think they need a – a representative of the family. You’ll have to do.’

And Sandro had had to put up with the woman’s dismissiveness. He needed the business, he needed the contacts; if he upset Giovanna Badigliani, then Luisa would get upset and, besides, however much of a self-absorbed monster the mother was, a girl was missing.

Had he detected, below the bluster and the recriminations, a note of guilt in Serena Hutton’s tirade? He hoped so, for the girl’s sake. And for Lucia Gentileschi’s sake he needed to put to sleep his ridiculous idea that Veronica Hutton’s disappearance had anything at all to do with her drowned husband.

As he had stood there in the Via della Chiesa with his feet soaked, Sandro wondered if that was really what it was, just a ridiculous notion he’d got into his head. He had seen the girl on Tuesday morning, around eleven-thirty, walking through San Frediano, when by the limited evidence he had gathered, Claudio would also have been in San Frediano. Had she been walking towards the Boboli? She had been carrying her bag, certainly, so she hadn’t lost it there yet, and going vaguely in that direction; quite possibly following the route he
had taken himself, straight along the Via della Chiesa towards the Via Romana and the back gate to the Boboli.

So their paths might have crossed; that meant nothing. In his head Sandro turned over what the barman had said; Claudio the silent type with his regular habits, asking for his whisky sour and nothing more, so quiet they never guessed he didn’t live around the corner at all, but over the other side of town.

Futilely Sandro had shaken out one shoe, then the other, but he hadn’t set off again, only stood in the limited shelter of the jutting eaves of a deconsecrated convent where, he read, Sister So and So had devoted her life to the rescuing of the city’s wanton girls. May she rest in God’s peace.

She had not looked wanton, Veronica Hutton hurrying down the Via del Leone with her striped hair and her handbag slung over her shoulder; she’d looked pretty, anxious, eager; maybe a hint of a sharp edge to her, a tiny clue to what she might grow into, with a mother like the woman he’d just spoken to on the crackling line from Dubai. But, then, the older he got, the less ready he was to judge wantonness much of a crime anyway; look at poor old Giulietta Sarto, a life of prostitution was hardly a barrel of laughs, was it? Promiscuity – well, he didn’t like it, it didn’t make anyone happy, but the world was changing and there wasn’t a thing he could do about it. Did he still want women to marry as virgins?

Damn, thought Sandro, on a tangent, he’d meant to call on Sarto at that women’s health centre place, get her out to lunch.

He’d have to talk to Sarto about Luisa and her – her – he could hardly bring himself to say it, lump, even though lump didn’t have to mean the worse word. He had looked at it when she raised her shirt in the kitchen, and for a second it
had
been just flesh, just another of the body’s irregularities, the kind of thing you get used to as it all starts to sag and slide. And then in the blink of an eye it was something else; it was the future. It was waiting in queues at the clinic; it was having to wear a hospital gown that didn’t close at the back; it was fear.

Luisa was the closest thing Sarto had to a mother, her own long since dead, consumed by drugs, Luisa the one waiting for her when she
was released from the institution they’d kept her in after she was found unfit to plead. Giulietta Sarto would have to be told. The truth was, he wanted to sit down with and say it out loud to another human being. It might be cancer.

And only then did he push himself away from the wall of the convent in the Via della Chiesa and set off, for his hastily arranged appointment with Maresciallo Falco of the Carabinieri, soaked to the bone and naggingly aware of having shaved badly that morning. In the thin morning light of the bathroom they had shared for their whole married life, his mind had been on Luisa’s expression as she left for work and not on his razor. Catching sight of himself in a shopfront, Sandro didn’t look like a policeman, or an ex-policeman; he didn’t even look much like a low-rent private detective. What he most looked like was a bum.

It had made it worse, not better, of course that he was an ex-officer of the Polizia Statale; it would have made things easier if he’d been one of the private detectives off the hoardings with their toytown badges, fresh out of college. The girl’s mother should have looked one of those up in the yellow pages instead of talking to Giovanna Badigliani.

Of course, it would be a Carabinieri case; they generally handled that kind of thing, petty theft, burglary, and, besides, if the bag was found in the Boboli it was a no-brainer, as the Americans would say. The Boboli housed the big and beautiful station that was their Florentine headquarters, set above the orangery in its own iris beds.

He’d been there before. The Polizia Statale and the Carabinieri always acted in full co-operation. On paper they did, anyway. But even when he’d still been a policeman, in that building, among the southern boys with their cavalry officers’ uniforms, dark blue striped with red, Sandro had never had any kind of leverage, no inside track. Now he’d told himself that he was representing the girl’s mother, who could not be there and didn’t speak a great deal of Italian anyway; it was reasonable. And if they’d spoken to Serena Hutton already, there was the possibility that they’d be very happy indeed to deal with Sandro instead.

At least they had let him in. The young couple under an umbrella at the entrance to the Boboli, making their minds up as to whether it
could be worth going in – were they crazy? Sandro thought perhaps all foreigners were just crazy – looked at him curiously as he stood there bareheaded, but the girl in the booth just waved him through. The trees dripped on him as he made his way up to the big villa, the cold hallway echoed with the sounds of traffic and rain, and the little pudgy-faced desk officer made a meal of searching for his name on an admissions sheet. Then made him wait in a pokey lobby outside the maresciallo’s office for a good half an hour, because he was out.

When eventually Maresciallo Falco returned, he sauntered in past Sandro without looking at him, his gloves in one hand, a tall, dark-skinned, handsome man. There was something about the way carabinieri walked, Sandro decided. Put his back up. And the man was perhaps twenty years younger than him.

Falco disappeared into the office and a full ten minutes later Sandro was buzzed in. They didn’t get off to a good start when without preamble Sandro said briskly, ‘So, can we start at the beginning? Who found the bag?’

It was like pulling teeth. Falco looked offended and promptly disappeared again for another ten minutes, during which time Sandro suspected him of doing nothing more productive than getting a coffee. On his return the maresciallo reluctantly handed over a thin cardboard file – soon there’d be no paper files, reflected Sandro gloomily, it would all be on computer – which contained a copy of the report. Sandro glanced at it, noted that it contained the name of the woman who’d found the bag, Fiamma DiTommaso, forty-nine years old, an address in the Via dei Bardi. Otherwise known as the Cat Lady.

‘It’s all in there,’ said Falco, obviously expecting that to be an end to it.

‘Um – might I just ask a couple of questions, Maresciallo?’ Sandro could hear himself, trying to be obsequious, and didn’t like it. Falco sighed, explosively, but stayed where he was.

‘Fiamma DiTommaso handed the bag in on Tuesday?’ said Sandro.

‘Tuesday evening,’ said Falco, looking away from him and out of the window. ‘Five o’clock.’

‘What did she say, this Cat Lady? Anything useful?’

‘She’s nuts,’ said Falco. ‘She’s only interested in her cats.’ Sandro nodded, wondering how that little exchange would have gone, Falco and the Cat Lady.

‘So she said nothing?’

‘She did a lot of muttering about her cats,’ said Falco tersely. ‘I’m surprised she bothered handing it in at all.’ He seemed ready to jump up and show Sandro the door if he said another word about the Cat Lady.

‘OK, OK,’ said Sandro, hands up. He paused, gauging the best way not to sound offensive with his next question. ‘And you didn’t identify the owner – didn’t trace her to the Scuola Massi till Friday?’

Tight-lipped, Falco said, ‘We assumed it had just been dumped by a mugger. It happens all the time.’

Sandro breathed out. ‘Although there was money in the purse.’

Falco shrugged, holding Sandro’s eye. ‘Had to dump it before he got a chance to look inside. That happens, too.’