The Old Wine Shades (26 page)

Melrose thought there might be a compliment buried in there somewhere, but he didn’t care for this juxtaposition of their separate fates. ‘Anyway, you’ll have to give me Torres’s address and phone number.’

‘Address? The man’s lived in San Gimignano for years. I’d bet any of the Sangimiginanesi could tell you in a minute where Ben Torres lives.’

‘The what?’

‘Sangimiginanesi.’

There was a brief silence. ‘Since when did you learn to speak Italian?’

‘I don’t. I’m looking at
Time Out Florence.
Florence and surroundings. It’s one of those guides written largely for the teenager who wants to find the best DJ place.’

‘Well, you certainly got that San-whatever off rather well. Spell it for me. I have a pencil.’

Jury made some kind of noise. ‘S-a-n-g-i-m-i-g-n-a-n-e-s-i. It’s the people there, as you might say ‘Florentine’ for the ones in Florence.’

‘Yes, ‘Florentine’ I can manage quite nicely. This one, though, I want to run by Diane, who seems to shine at Italian pronunciation. I mean, for someone who says, ‘Let’s all go there and sit around the piazza,’ well. Anyway, what do you want me to find out about Ben Torres?’

‘I don’t know, do I? That’s why you’re going to talk to him. Since this queer story about the house and his mother got to me by way of another person, I wouldn’t be surprised if something got omitted or changed.’

‘Sangimignanorines. How’s that?’

‘Oh, for God’s sake,’ Jury breathed. ‘Don’t forget your mobile.’

‘I don’t have—’ But Jury had already hung up.

Mungo sat up on the sofa watching Schrödinger dash from chair to table to bookshelf, trying to find the source of the mewling.

She missed the Trilby hat left on a table; Mungo had nosed up the brim and shoved Elf under it and now it was moving around. The moving Trilby. Mungo sighed.

30

Melrose had booked a room in the same little hotel he and Trueblood had stayed in during their frenzied trip to Florence the year before. He loved this hotel, which occupied the upper floors of an old building and was reached by way of a cool marble staircase bathed in shadows. He had not discerned who or what occupied the ground floor. Probably no one did. The air was as undisturbed as it had been then.

The hotel was a refuge; when something moved here, it moved in padded silence. He thought the personnel, receptionist, waiters, manager went about in slippers instead of shoes. The floor was marble, but not the tap of a heel was to be heard. He had even asked for the same room; the management actually remembered it. Well, it hadn’t been so long, only a few months since he had been here; still, there was so much for the Florentines to think about—the David, the Duomo, the gold, the gloves—that Melrose was quite astounded he himself was worth remembering. No, it was probably crazy Trueblood they remembered, walking around in a trance with his Masaccio panels—or at least what he’d hoped were.

The little hotel was on a tiny cobbled street, but what wasn’t once you left the center and the San Marco palazzo? It wasn’t much of a walk to the Ponte Vecchio and that was where he headed when he went out.

The Arno, fretted with sunlight, moved so slowly it seemed almost still. The bridge was lined with little shops, mostly jewelers’ and goldsmiths’. It was so pleasant to walk on old stone, to look at old gold, to breathe old air.

The glove shop at the other end of the bridge was as crowded this time as it had been the last; one could barely get to the counter or catch the attention of a shop assistant. These gloves were made of such creamy leather and in such misty or lustrous colors, the shop might as well have been selling rainbows and sunsets.

The spare little woman whose head didn’t reach much higher than Melrose’s elbow had no compunction about shoving it and the rest of Melrose out of the way, an unsuccessful effort that released a spate of Italian which could only be a string of invective.

Hundreds, even thousands, of pairs of gloves in plastic sleeves were nestled in little niches built all over the wall like an enormous letter box. Hot colors, cold colors, pale colors, bright colors—colors one doesn’t see anywhere else except in sea or sunrise. The blues could be anywhere between the blue of the Aegean and the shadows cast on a snowy winter’s day.

As he stood, contemplating this deluge of gloves sorted by color and size across the wall, the crowd had magically thinned out and he was actually being offered assistance. He asked to see the rose, the peacock blue, the sea blue, the winter blue. He purchased twelve pairs, enough to pay his hotel bill, and still felt he’d the best of the bargain. He watched the woman wrap his gloves; he loved the way the French and Italians did this, so carefully and prettily as if every purchase were a present.

One pair he asked to be left unwrapped, not to wear but just to feel its buttery softness. He left the shop.

Melrose walked back across the Ponte Vecchio, stopping every now and then to look at the Amo and its still passage. He held the gloves against his face, feeling comforted, and thought random thoughts of home.

31

As if the hilltop town in Tuscany was a fortress (and it probably had been), San Gimignano was surrounded by gated walls and graced by tower houses. In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, the gates would have been closed and guarded in the night and the streets tied off with chains and the people under curfew. At least, Melrose imagined it had been that way. Feudal families built these towers, and probably all competed for the tallest tower. He imagined an early morning in winter, seeing the towers poking through smoke or fog, the whole little town floating above the hill it stood on.

Melrose parked his bee-sized car in the car park and undertook the uphill journey into the center of San Gimignano, if it could be said to have a center. This hike he was making could easily take the place of dueling at dawn, the winner the one who got to the top first.

He stopped in a little trattoria on the Via San Mateo for some
acqua minerale.
He drank a lot of it as it was one thing he could pronounce correctly.
‘Acqua minerale
’ he more or less flung out and was served without the waiter’s asking him, with furrowed brow, to repeat himself. He left and continued his walk on the cobbled street to the landmark torture museum and past it and then looked for the house number that had been furnished by the trattoria waiters after they had a brief argument over Signore della Torres’s house.

Ben Torres looked very English. He was dressed in flannel and a blue linen shirt, a man of medium height, with dark hair, long nose and eyes the blue of his shirt. He (blessedly) sounded English, too. His English was impeccable. Well, he
was
English, wasn’t he?

It was just that one tended to think anyone who lived long in another country would assume its speech, its dress, its manner.

‘Mr. Plant—?’

Melrose nodded and followed Ben Torres into a living room or library. Offered a drink, Melrose automatically said
acqua minerale
before he remembered Torres was English and then quickly changed the water to whiskey.

Torres laughed. ‘You know, I think I can identify an alcoholic as the one who asks for
acqua minerale!’

‘Well, this one doesn’t.’ Melrose held the chunky glass and looked round the room. It really was a sort of dream house for bibliophiles. There were books everywhere, on the shelves, on the floor, on the window seat, on the desk, where a few lay open, staggered across one another, as though Torres had been consulting them. They lay beside a computer.

‘Odd to see that in a place like San Gimignano.’ Ben Torres said of the computer. ‘Strikes a discordant note, I think.’

‘Not if you’re using it.’

Ben Torres smiled. ‘You wanted to see me about the house in Surrey?’

‘I’ve told your estate agent that I’d like to rent it. I’d actually like to buy the leasehold. The agent said no, that you weren’t interested in selling it. But as I was in Florence, I thought it wouldn’t hurt to come round and see you.’

‘Well, the agent is correct there. I could let you have it on a longish lease, four or five years, but I don’t want to sell. Winterhaus is my childhood home; it’s been in the family for nearly a century; I couldn’t let it go.’ He paused and regarded his glass of whiskey, held up to the late-morning light. ‘Do you know anything about the house?’

‘I’m not sure what you mean.’

‘It’s a provocative place.’ Ben Torres’s smile was slightly lopsided as if he meant to call the smile back. ‘Things happen.’

Melrose smiled too. ‘They usually do. The agent told me the house had been vacant for some time.’

‘It’s quite isolated. When I was a child I thought the place pretty spooky. All of that dark interior, those haunted woods.’

‘Haunted?’

‘Well, as children do, you know, assign malevolence to certain places, I did that to the woods around the house. It’s a good candidate for creepiness, don’t you think? I had too much imagination and a place it could run wild.’

Was Ben Torres on to him? After all, people who wanted to rent a property didn’t ordinarily go to another country to discuss it with the owner.

He tried a different tack to pry the story out of him that Torres’s mother had told him. ‘Does your family live in England?’

‘They’re dead, unfortunately.’

‘I’m sorry.’

‘Yes. My father and mother died only a few months apart. They were divorced, anyway.’

‘Did they share your feeling about the house? Its provocative nature?’

Ben Torres was thoughtful. ‘I think my mother might have. But she was highly imaginative, too.’

Go on. Go on about the frightening figure on the path who scared her. Melrose realized—he had what he could only call a small epiphany—he wanted to hear it not just because he wanted to find out something to help them solve this strange case, but also to hear it because it was all such a damned good story. He was fascinated. ‘So they didn’t see the woodland ghost? No lurking apparitions?’ He wondered how close to the figure on the path he could take this without giving away his reason for coming.

‘No ghosts or apparitions that I heard about. My mother did have a vivid imagination, though.’ He smiled and took a swallow of whiskey and didn’t go on.

Melrose felt an urge to swat him. ‘How did that manifest itself?’ What a wooden question.

Ben Torres didn’t seem to mind. ‘She didn’t want me playing in the woods, I know that.’ He laughed as if pleased by this.

It’s not the woods. It’s
not
the woods!

Melrose looked quickly around. Where had that message come from?

‘But didn’t tell me why.’

Hell. Torres had come up with a psychic for a mother and then dropped it. ‘Was there some sort of history of strange events in that house?’

‘Not that I ever heard about. People are like that, aren’t they? The isolated house, the banished garden, the deep woods. It’s a kind of a mainstay of Victorian literature, isn’t it? My mother was a romantic, I expect.’ He raised his glass. ‘Another?’

Melrose nodded, wishing his host wouldn’t start and stop the way he was inclined to do.

Torres turned from the drinks table and said, ‘Do I detect in you a man who wants to believe a house is haunted?’

Melrose lurched a bit in his chair, then laughed a bit artificially. What he wanted was the rest of the mother’s story. ‘Lord, I hope not. Was that what your mother wanted?’

Torres handed him his drink and sat down again. The drink was still a frugal finger. Torres wasn’t cheap; perhaps he preferred small drinks to show himself he didn’t drink much. It was hardly past noon. ‘I don’t know, honestly, what my mother wanted.’

There was just an edge to the statement, an edge of disappointment? Anger? But, of course, he stopped again, dropping the subject.

‘When I was looking at the house, there was a child there, I mean, outside, at the bottom of the gardens, playing in a sort of Wendy house, I guess it’s called.’

‘You must mean Tilda. Yes, she lives nearby. When I was last there, I saw her. I’m sure she’s behind the tea in the cups that so puzzled the estate agent. I didn’t tell her, anyway.’

That answered one spectral question. Except they already knew this.

Melrose wished he’d get around to telling this story of the figure on the path that Torres had told Harry Johnson.

But there was a difference between him and Harry Johnson. Harry had come on a mission, to discover anything he could about the house as if the history might explain the awful business of Glynnis Gault’s disappearance. He was standing in for poor Hugh Gault. Whereas Melrose himself had come only to ask if the house might be for sale. He had taken the wrong tack but, then, what other could he take?

‘How about lunch?’ asked Ben Torres. ‘The trattoria on the Via San Mateo is quite good. You probably passed it on your way up the hill.’

Melrose agreed and they set off.

‘I have a friend,’ said Melrose, ‘who’s crazy about the torture museum.’ Melrose inclined his head in that direction as they passed.

Ben Torres laughed. ‘That’s wonderful. Someone whose memory of San Gimignano is fixed on that museum. It’s rather mad; or perhaps the person whose collection it is, is mad.’