The Drowning River (37 page)

They were in a bar Jackson had never been in before, a back-street place that was long and narrow as a corridor, nowhere to sit, mirror along one wall dripping condensation and a shelf under it to rest your coffee on. The air was fusty with the odour of damp wool but ahead of them Hiroko had calmly threaded her way through the packed bodies and made a space. Jackson fetched coffee, struggling with the Italian, but nobody in this place spoke English.

‘So, Jackson,’ said Hiroko, placing herself square in front of him. ‘You have talked to Iris?’ He got the apologies out of the way, he seemed to have spent the day stumbling over his words what with one thing and another, while they stared him down. And then he came to it.

‘She thinks it’s Massi Ronnie was going away with,’ he said. ‘Actually, she knows.’

‘No way,’ said Sophia, round-eyed.

Hiroko remained silent, waiting for his evidence.

‘I don’t like him,’ she said quietly when he’d finished – or almost finished. ‘I never liked him, from the beginning, too much fake. And he actually does not know so much about painting; he dated two of the Uccello drawings wrong, and the techniques of the mediaeval, he knows nothing, Antonella knows more than him.’ Jackson stared at her; quiet, polite, attentive Hiroko, had been thinking this all along?

‘Only this is not evidence,’ she said patiently. ‘The Zecchi colours, the trip to Sicily – well, I agree, there is some kind of evidence, but in a – in a court of law?’

Jackson fumbled in his pocket, in a panic; could he have just stuck it in there? Had it fallen out?

‘Here,’ he said. ‘Look? Here?’ They stared at the tiny square of plastic. ‘Anyone got a phone?’ he asked, and Sophia took hers out only she seemed to have an iPhone all of a sudden, just like his. He looked at her; she bought it because of me, he realized, and they cost twice as much here. Ah, shit.

‘No good,’ he said apologetically, bringing out his own, ‘y’know, locked? Both of ’em. No way you can get around the contract with the iPhone. Stupid, huh?’ He tried to smile at her, but ducked his head before she could glare back. Hiroko set her own phone on the counter, a modest, scratched little number. ‘Yeah,’ he said enthusiastically, ‘yeah, great.’

Calmly she slid off the back, held out her hand for the card, slid it in over the contacts, replaced the battery, turned it on. The screen opened.

‘Message,’ said Hiroko, pointing to a small icon in the corner. ‘Answerphone message?’

‘Yeah, OK,’ said Jackson, itching to get his hands on the phone but not wanting to muscle in. Hiroko handed it to him wordlessly. Call info, missed calls, down, down, and there he was. He held up the screen.

‘Paolo,’ said Sophia, sceptically. ‘Well, it’s not as if it isn’t, like, about the third most common name in Italy or anything, is it?’

Hiroko gave her a soft look of reproof. ‘You just have to telephone
the number,’ she suggested. ‘And then we know.’ Jackson handed her the phone. ‘You,’ he said. ‘You do it.’

Iris stopped outside the apartment building, soaked to the bone. She’d had to walk all the way, because something was up with the traffic – no buses, no taxis, nothing. She didn’t know if she’d even be able to remember the way, but she was here.

At the crossroads a drain had burst, bubbling up through the grating like a geyser to meet a torrent pouring down the Via San Domenico from Fiesole. As she made her way through it the thought occurred to Iris that this was more than just another traffic screw-up, it was a full-scale natural disaster. Ma might be watching it on television; I could call, thought Iris, with longing. After; I’ll call after.

Looking up at the building’s grim facade, she thought that it would be warm inside, at least. She didn’t want to start this thing by asking for something dry to wear, but what the hell. Too late now. She leaned on the doorbell, hard.

Giulietta Kept Asking Her how she was as they walked, half ran, back along the narrow streets in the dark. ‘You OK, darling?’

And looking at her anxiously. ‘I’ll be fine,’ Luisa said, through numb lips. ‘When we get there.’

The traffic seemed to be moving, slowly, though it was still chaos; at the end of the Via dei Bardi they came out on to the river. To get to the Via Romana they could have gone over the top from the Costa Scarpuccia, up the steep, steep hill and back down on to the Via Guicciardini, but Luisa had just shaken her head when Giuli pointed up there; she felt breathless enough as it was.

Nothing to do with the damned stupid lump, she told herself, the breathlessness. It was to do with what she’d just heard.

‘We should call Sandro,’ Giulietta had said, straight away they came back out on to the street.

‘No,’ she said. ‘Let’s get over there, now. It’s ten minutes, and I want him in front of me.’ And she took a breath of the blessed cold wet air, her nostrils still itching and full of that terrible stink of tomcat.

Not dirty, though, she reminded herself, Fiamma DiTommaso wasn’t dirty; what was dirt, after all, but matter in the wrong place?

Luisa, proud housewife, had never imagined herself even thinking such a thing. Fiamma DiTommaso might be an angry, eccentric old woman, but she was sane. And she had an excellent memory.

‘I was minding my own business,’ she’d said fiercely, clutching the cat, hunched over it on the sofa. ‘Setting out the dishes, clean dishes every day. I wasn’t looking up, just setting them out then pouring the pellets in, when I heard these footsteps running, skidding, they were, down from the Kaffeehaus. Might have been kids, they’re always hurtling around the place scaring the cats. Only the sound of the footsteps was louder, the breathing was heavier. And she was crying, and it wasn’t a child’s crying, nor yet quite an adult’s neither.’

‘Nineteen,’ said Luisa, not even sure if she’d spoken out loud, thinking of the sound of a terrified nineteen-year-old crying. All the daughters in the world cry out for their mother when they’re frightened. Luisa had cried out for her own, once or twice. ‘She was – she’s nineteen.’ She swallowed. ‘You couldn’t see a thing?’

Fiamma DiTommaso shrank at that, defensively. ‘I’m not lying,’ she said.

‘I know you’re not,’ said Luisa, looking her in the eye. The woman held her gaze suspiciously a moment then seemed to relax.

‘I was concentrating on staying very still,’ she said. ‘I’m not always welcome there, you know. People don’t understand.’

‘No,’ said Luisa.

‘I saw shapes, through the trees,’ said DiTommaso. ‘The girl was wearing jeans, I could see her legs in the tight jeans. And there was an old man, only, well, he was staying out of my line of vision, I could hear him kind of shuffling, like he didn’t know whether to stay or go. There was a woman in a kind of white coat, long, below the knees.’

‘Right,’ said Luisa, trying to imagine such a thing. An Italian woman wearing a white coat in November? Beppe DiLieto had said something about a headscarf – and a – had he said duster coat? It must be her.

‘Leave
me alone,
the girl was saying.
Get away from me.
And sobbing, like a child.’

Fiamma DiTommaso frowned down at the floor. ‘Then it was the woman.
Dirty old man,
she said.
Dirty, disgusting old man, what stories
have you been telling her?
Then the girl said, again,
Leave me alone,
she was crying,
Get away from me.
All over again, terrified.’

She looked up from the cat then, eyes wide and blue, like some kind of Cassandra seeing into the future for a second. ‘And then the old man said,
You heard her, leave her alone
.’ She paused, still gazing up. ‘Poor old man, his voice was trembling, like he was frightened himself.
Leave her alone, you terrible creature,
he said.
What’s she done?’

‘I don’t understand -’ Giulietta had leaned forward at that. ‘Who was attacking who?’ She turned to Luisa. ‘I thought the waiter said Claudio had been groping the girl?’

‘It was the woman,’ said Luisa softly, not knowing how she knew, but she knew. ‘The woman in the white coat. She set it all up; Claudio would never have laid a finger on that child. Beppe never saw it with his own eyes, did he?’

Fiamma DiTommaso went on as if she hadn’t spoken, rhythmically stroking the huge dusty cat on her knee. It set up a loud purring. ‘Then someone’s phone went off, and the woman said,
Give it to me, give it to me, you little b – ’
And DiTommaso broke off, biting her lips shut on the word. She took a breath. ‘There was some kind of struggle. Between the jeans and the white coat, I heard these horrible angry sounds, and something smashing, bash, bash, bash against a tree. Then the bag came flying over, through the trees, and landed right in front of me.’

‘So it wasn’t him,’ whispered Giulietta reverently. ‘Sandro was right. I knew it couldn’t have been old Claudio. Old Claudio wouldn’t have hurt a fly.’

DiTommaso turned her head slowly to look at Giulietta. ‘Is that his name?’

Luisa opened her mouth to say,
Was,
but closed it again. Giuli nodded.

‘It seemed to me like the woman had hold of the girl, at that point,’ said Fiamma DiTommaso. ‘Otherwise she might have come after the bag, she was furious when the girl did that. Their legs were very close together, the woman in the long white coat and the girl in jeans; that woman must have been strong.’

‘Not if she was angry enough,’ said Luisa, half to herself.

‘She started shouting things at the old man, then. He was trying to leave, maybe he was going to get help, because I didn’t think he would have left the girl like that otherwise.’

Fiamma DiTommaso was pale now, as if with the realization of her own small share in the guilt. Doggedly she went on. ‘The older woman said,
Don’t you dare leave.
She said,
I’ll tell them you touched her, you dirty old bastard, I’ll tell them, you did touch her, didn’t you? What will your wife say?
Then she seemed to think of something.
Oh, sorry, your wife’s dead, isn’t she, don’t you remember?’

She paused, frowning. ‘I didn’t understand that, because if your wife was dead, you’d remember, wouldn’t you? It’s not something you’d forget.’

And then Luisa had said, her heart heavier than she could remember it, ‘I don’t know.’

Nearly there, thought Luisa as they came out on to the river, the home straight, down past the Palazzo Pitti – but then the sight of the river stopped her in her tracks.

The water looked black in the dark but she could hear it roar; my God, she thought, it’s high. On the banks opposite she could see under the yellow glow of streetlighting that the Rowing Club’s terrace was under three metres of foaming water and above it a row of fire engines were parked under the great arches of the Uffizi. Closer, the seething torrent was almost filling the arches of the Ponte Vecchio, and a boat that had been moored under the bridge was no more than matchwood, no more than debris among all the rest, great branches from the Casentino, planks washed away from jetties and shacks further upriver, like the contents of some gigantic nest. Like the nest of some vast untidy bird.

‘Jesus,’ said Giulietta, tightening her grip on Luisa’s arm. ‘Let’s go.’

But ahead of them the road was almost blocked by a great crowd at the foot of the Ponte Vecchio, a crowd of rubberneckers and innocents, scattered across the stationary traffic, surging and clamouring against a barrier where ten or fifteen policemen stood with arms folded.

‘How the hell are we going to get through?’ said Giulietta, and at her side Luisa suddenly felt so weak all she could do was sit down, there and then, on the streaming pavement.

‘Luisa,’ said Giulietta, on her knees beside her, and Luisa could hear the alarm in her voice.

She took out her phone and pushed it at Giulietta. ‘Text him,’ she said. ‘Text Sandro.’

The moment Paolo Massi answered his phone, Sandro knew he was guilty.

The colour drained from his face as he stared down at the device’s tiny screen, while it continued to ring. He looked from Antonella Scarpa to Sandro, then put the phone to his ear and said, ‘Veronica?’ His voice was hollow with fear.

Not shock, not anger at the trouble the girl had put them to, not joy that she was still alive, after all, but fear. As if he’d seen a ghost.

‘Veronica?’ he said again and this time it was with a hideous kind of false jaunty surprise that fooled no one.

Sandro lunged for the phone and snatched it from him before he had a chance to protest. ‘Hello?’ he said sharply into the handset. ‘Signorina Hutton? Hello? Who is this?’ But the line was dead. Sandro closed his hand tight around the telephone, whipped it behind his back, out of Massi’s reach. Out of the corner of his eye he made sure of the whereabouts of Antonella Scarpa, under the light that led out to the back. She seemed rooted to the spot.

‘It was you,’ he said, looking at Massi. ‘It was you, wasn’t it?’

Looking hollow-eyed and unshaven under the downlighters, the man tried a laugh, and Sandro took a threatening step towards him.

‘Don’t even start,’ he said. Massi took a step back, so he was right up against the wall, next to the drawing of the girl on her back.

‘Is that her?’ he asked, coming up close to the picture’s glass. ‘Who chose the drawing? It looks like Veronica Hutton.’

Nobody said anything. Sandro shifted to face them again. ‘I don’t know how you did it,’ he said to Paolo Massi, ‘but you know she’s dead, don’t you? You know where Veronica Hutton is, because you put her there, and now you’re afraid she’s got out, she’s come back to haunt you.’

‘No,’ said Massi, ‘no -’ white as a sheet’- she’s not dead, it wasn’t me, I was here the whole time, at my desk the whole time, anyone can tell you. It wasn’t me – it was her, it wasn’t me -’

In his pocket Sandro’s own phone bleeped – again? Messages. How could he look at messages now? But it could be Luisa. His stomach took a lurch; he should never have set them off on their own. He felt a moment of awful indecision; he saw the three of them shut inside this red-walled cavernous space, and Massi and Scarpa just waiting for his concentration to slip. Outside the rain and the traffic receded, as if they belonged to a world to which he might never return.