The Drowning River (41 page)

‘Oh, I’m sorry, I forgot, it was all your wife’s fault, wasn’t it? She did everything.’

‘She. . .’ Paolo Massi choked on the words, self-pitying. ‘She didn’t like my father.’

‘That figures,’ said Sandro, knowing that the man had broken, now: it hadn’t been so difficult after all. ‘But let’s get back to the point, shall we? I want to know what happened next, because I need to find Veronica Hutton, you see. I need to give her back, alive or dead, to the people who love her.’ He felt Luisa’s eyes on him but he didn’t look away from Massi.

‘So you decided between you that Claudio Gentileschi would be a very handy suspect when her body was found, eventually? Particularly if he was dead; nothing neater than a murderer who kills himself out of remorse. Was she dead, by then, little Ronnie, by Wednesday evening when you told Antonella not to come to the gallery because your wife was helping? Was she dead when you took her out of the back and bundled her into the car? Or didn’t you dare? I bet your wife would dare.’

‘No, she – ’ Massi had the slack-jawed look of an idiot now, but even an idiot knew when to shut up.

‘People saw Claudio, or thought they saw him, molesting the girl, didn’t they? And he was losing his marbles, wasn’t he, it’d be easy enough to make it stick. And then she had a better idea, didn’t she? Persuade him he’d be better off dead, what with the shame of it all.’

Luisa’s voice broke in, clear and firm.

‘She told Claudio his wife was dead,’ she said. ‘Fiamma DiTommaso overheard them.’ Massi turned to look at Luisa as she added, ‘She heard her say,
Don’t you remember, your wife’s dead?’

Giulietta was nodding, at her side. Massi turned to look at them, shrunk small, cornered.

Sandro took over. ‘It wouldn’t have been hard, would it? Dirty old man, you’d be better off dead. What was there for him to live for? There’d always been just the two of them.’

And as the words were spoken Luisa turned her head just slightly, so as not to look at him, and the chill was there, across his heart too. He forced himself to say what he had to say next.

‘And then she held out her hand for his keys.’ Sandro pulled the set of keys Lucia Gentileschi had taken from the scroll-top desk out of his pocket. ‘He had a spare set at home, did you know that? His wife found them, and gave them to me.

‘Why did she ask for the keys, Paolo?’ Sandro went on. ‘What proposal did she make to you when she came back here from the Lungarno Santa Rosa, still in her white coat? Remove the evidence, the stock of fakes, worth a penny or two, and then what? Plant a bit of evidence, instead? Just to make sure, when they found the body, that
the finger pointed right at Claudio? That must be why you left that Post-it note up in the studio, after you’d taken such care to clear the place out? Very helpful. And what other evidence did you plant?’

Sandro held up the Yale key. ‘This is the front door key,’ he said.

The next key. ‘This is the key to the studio.’

Then, finally, the tiny key, the key to a letterbox, only the building where Claudio had his studio had been too cheap for letterboxes, the post lay on the floor in the hallway. He held it up between thumb and finger, dangling it in Massi’s face.

‘And this key? A padlock? Some kind of storage shed, some lock-up somewhere? Outhouse, doghouse,
cantina?’

Giulietta was on her feet, hand in the air as though she was in school. Sandro held up a hand to tell her, wait. ‘I know,’ she whispered. ‘The dog, the boy told me Claudio had a dog, he was worried about the dog. Only there is no dog; Claudio never had a dog.’ Sandro nodded, still intent, fixed on Paolo Massi.

But the answer came from Antonella Scarpa.

‘He kept some stuff in a shed,’ she said quietly, and they all turned; she was looking at Massi. ‘Inflammables, thinners, that kind of thing. I can take you there.’

Iris was on the edge of unconsciousness when the next sound came; she was at the point of reaching out for it with longing, to ease the bursting in her head. But the sound was so loud she jerked in response, just as Anna Massi’s attention slackened, just fractionally. She managed to free one of her hands from the woman’s grip, her elbow came up and she crashed it, painfully, into the bridge of Anna Massi’s nose.

Falling back, Anna Massi shrieked, a horrible noise. With the blessed release of pressure from her windpipe Iris was on her feet and bellowing; she wasn’t even aware of whether the sounds she was making were words.

‘Iris?’ The voice was muffled and panicky, but she recognized it; it guided her through the dark towards the door.

Oh, God, she thought, oh, thank you. Jackson. She blundered across footstools and coffee tables, and it wasn’t until she got to the door that she realized Anna Massi wasn’t behind her. She fumbled with chains and bolts, every moment waiting for the woman to lay hold of her again, but there was nothing. The door opened and there he was; she thought she’d never been so glad to see anyone her whole life.

The first thing he did was reach past her and turn on the light.

As He Stepped Out of the car, it came to Sandro that somehow he had always known he would end up back here. He had sat in his car gazing up at the Boboli, imagining it as somewhere evil had been done, yet it seemed to him now that it must have been this place that had occupied that space in his thoughts, all along. It had been this dirty, neglected stretch of river that ended in marshland; where the homeless foraged for food in rubbish and weeds, where the city stored its detritus in a shambles of crumbling shacks.

The place where Claudio Gentileschi had last seen the sky and breathed the city’s polluted, lovely air, one bright November day before the rains began. The Lungarno Santa Rosa.

Giulietta and Luisa agreed to stay in the car with Massi; on the far side of him in the back seat Giulietta was intent on punching numbers into her mobile. On the near side Luisa gave him a thumbs up through the window as Sandro locked them in, grateful for a car so ancient such a procedure was possible. Sandro failed to return the gesture, so reluctant was he, suddenly, to take another step towards the inevitable. He straightened, Antonella Scarpa stiffly obedient at his side, and forced himself on.

‘You know exactly where it is?’ He’d asked the question as they’d crawled through the traffic to traverse the kilometre or so from the
Via Romana to the Lungarno Santa Rosa. They might have walked, but Sandro wanted everyone together, he wanted his eye on them all.

‘More or less,’ said Scarpa. ‘Behind the social club, whatever it’s called.’

‘The Circolo Rondinella.’

He’d had to blink away the vision of that place, the pergola under the rain and the Portakabin where someone had been watching him, it made him feel so sick with foreboding.

‘I could call Tomi,’ Giulietta had piped up. ‘Comic-book Boy?’

‘You have his number?’ Sandro had taken his eyes off the traffic to look back at her, squeezed in the back seat. Next to her Massi’s eyes were glazed with a look Sandro had seen in any number of guilty parties, absenting himself from the here and now, hoping it would all go away.

Blank denial; the trouble was, sometimes it worked. And then Sandro’d had to stifle the fear that, between them, Massi and his wife had been clever enough to eliminate the evidence, to shove it all on to Claudio. Which was really the fear of finding her; it was what all this was all about, wasn’t it? He wasn’t a police officer any more; he didn’t have any of that apparatus that protected him from the dead, the feel and look and smell of the dead. No latex gloves, no evidence bags, no team of brothers, no jovial forensic technicians with their gallows humour, no fatherly, unshaven pathologist dragged from his bed to attend. Sandro was alone.

‘Call the boy,’ he’d said. ‘Yeah.’ But there’d been no answer.

Standing in the lee of the great wall of San Frediano, Scarpa beside him, Sandro realized that by some miracle the rain had stopped. The air was clear and cold, and without the soft sound of rain to muffle it, the roar of the river below them was like thunder.

‘Here,’ said Scarpa, and she stopped. Even she looked chastened now. They were in front of the steel gate of the Circolo Rondinella, the poster advertising ballroom dancing now no more than tattered pulp hanging from the wire.

Sandro pulled at the gate; it was locked. Silently Scarpa pointed to a gaping hole in the wire fence, then held it back as Sandro climbed
through. Too old for this, he felt dread take hold, but before he could even complete the thought he felt something shift beneath his feet.

‘Stay there,’ he said sharply over his shoulder to Antonella Scarpa. ‘Call a fire engine, call an ambulance, but don’t move.’ She nodded mutely.

‘Where?’ he asked. But she just pointed, helplessly, towards the ants’ nest of broken palings and half-collapsed plasterboard behind the clubhouse of the Circolo Rondinella. ‘Somewhere there,’ she said.

And then, as he took a step, a sound cut through the roar of the water underneath Sandro, the tinny, high-pitched sound of a ringtone, incongruous and familiar, the theme tune of some ancient TV cartoon show Sandro couldn’t place.

He moved towards the sound, around the side of the cabin and there it was, down a half-collapsed wooden walkway, the screen of a mobile phone blinking up at him in the dark as it rang. ‘Tiger Man,’ a tiny voice sang. Sandro reached for it and as he moved something came at him from the dark, took hold of his arm and held on for dear life.

Letting out an exclamation, Sandro struggled to free himself and saw beside him the painfully thin, upturned face of Tomi, Comic-book Boy, hair plastered all around it. He was holding a torch, its beam now directed at his own face, and he was making sounds.

‘What?’ said Sandro, holding the boy tight, looking him full in the face. ‘What are you saying?’

‘The dog,’ said the boy distinctly, rearing and struggling to escape eye contact. ‘The dog. Help him, Claudio’s dog.’

‘Where’s the dog?’ Sandro asked, and the boy shone the torch towards a battered door at a crazy angle near the far end of the disintegrating jetty, fastened shut by a brass padlock. And then below them something clattered and loosened, and the whole structure swayed. Bodily Sandro lifted the boy; he weighed next to nothing, all wire and bones; he hauled him back, across the terrace, pushed him out through the fence.

‘Give me your torch,’ he said, leaning through after him with his hand out.

‘My phone,’ said the boy, clinging to the fence, but Sandro was already gone.

It’s all right, he told himself as he moved down the broken boards that had once formed a path, there are other sheds underneath, they’ll go first.

He came to the phone and picked it up, put it in his pocket, but then when he straightened up his feet couldn’t get a purchase on the splintered wood, greasy with days of rain, and he slipped. Sandro heard his own breath whistle out of him as he went down, but he was all right, he slid down three, four feet and then he was at the door.

Torch between his teeth, Sandro fumbled in his pocket for the keys, the blasted keys, while with his other hand holding on to some upright that might or might not represent something solid in this disintegrating rubbish heap. He was on his knees, rearing backwards to counteract the steep angle. The key went in.

She was at the back, more like a heap of clothes than a human being, like a sack of drowned animals, dead weight. Ankles, wrists protruding, bound with picture wire. Feeling a terrible pressure in his chest, Sandro reached for her, pulled her up; he thought she must weigh twice, three times, what the boy had. He slung her across his body; he couldn’t manage a fireman’s lift. He held her to him like a great child, and then he moved.

With each impossible step back up towards the far-off yellow gleam of the embankment’s lighting, Sandro felt the whole structure under him being dismantled by the weight of the water and he knew that she was dead, that soon he would be too. Only he kept on, and underneath him the ground held, and then they were at the wire, and through the wire and on the pavement leaning against the low wall. And Sandro collapsed, the girl on top of him, and he held her against him as he sobbed.

There was no ambulance, there was no fire engine, but Antonella Scarpa was still there. ‘No one answers,’ she said, blankly, staring down at him – at them. ‘Get Luisa,’ he said, and he bowed his face over the girl’s, his cheek, unshaven, against her cold, soaked one.

And it was Luisa, his Luisa. Afterwards it seemed to Sandro that when his wife took hold of the girl’s wrist in hers, some mysterious
exchange took place, from Luisa’s warm beating heart to the girl’s blue-veined arm, cold as marble. His Luisa brought her back to life.

She had to say it three times, before he stopped shaking his head and allowed himself to believe her. ‘She’s got a pulse,’ said Luisa. And they sat there on the soaked stone of the Lungarno Santa Rosa, Sandro and Luisa holding the cold child between them, until finally the ambulance did arrive.

‘She can’t have vanished into thin air,’ said Jackson, and it turned out that he was mostly right.

In the bald, bright light of the central chandelier, the Massi’s
salotto
was revealed in all its disarray, a wall of books thick with dust, a ragbag of crudely coloured throws torn off the sofa in their struggle, and all the hanging things jangling, but Anna Massi was not there.

Thumping at switches, Iris and Jackson blundered through the flat until every door in the place was thrown open and every space blinked back at them under overhead light, but they found only that Anna Massi was not in the small nun’s cell, or in a neat, anonymous marital bedroom, or in the small, crowded bathroom.

It was only when they returned to the
salotto
and Iris realized that the long window had not been open before, and when the sounds of raised voices alerted them to the fact that something was happening in the street outside, that they came out to look for Anna Massi on the balcony. And failing to find her there, looked down into the street to realize that people had gathered not because something was happening but because something had happened, and they were gathered around that something.