The Savage Garden (27 page)

    Harry had removed himself to a stone bench during Adam's absence. He was lying on his back, staring at the star-stained sky. Adam popped the cork and filled their glasses.

    "Did you kiss her?"

    "Yes."

    "Bastard. She's too good for you."

    "Thanks." "It's true," said Harry. "I mean, you're a bright young boy and everything—" He broke off suddenly, snapping upright and fixing Adam with an intense stare. "My God, you
are
a bright young boy, aren't you?"

    "What?"

    "Yes, you are. I mean, I've always known it . . . but do you have any idea what you did today?"

    
"We
did it, Harry."

    "Rubbish. You were there, half a step away. You would have figured it out."

    Unaccustomed to hearing kind words from Harry, Adam wasn't quite sure how to react.

    "The first person in how many years?"

    "Three hundred and something."

    "I thought it was more."

    "We can push it to four if you think it'd make a better story."

    Harry laughed. "It's a great story. This is going to change everything."

    "Why?"

    "Well, you can't go off and sell insurance after this."

    "Why not?"

    "Why not!? Anyone can sell insurance. How many people can do that?" Harry thrust his hand in the general direction of the memorial garden.

    "What if I don't want to do that?"

    "You've got to."

    "Why?"

    "Why!? Because you see things other people don't."

    "No, I don't."

    "Yes you do. You always have. Even when we were kids. It's true, Paddler. You were always taking things apart, looking at them from the inside out. Mum always says: the only baby she's ever known that tried to smash its rattle open. We still laugh about it."

    "Oh, I'm happy for you both."

    "You look at things differently, you see things differently."

    "Then how come I looked at Flora and I didn't see her? Not really. I saw books."

    "So you learned something. You'll be better next time."

    "There isn't going to be a next time, Harry."

    Harry grew serious, almost aggressive. "Listen to me. It's not like the other night. I'm not talking about your friends, I'm not talking about the last two years of your life—I'm talking about the rest of it."

    "I know you are."

    "You can't become an insurance man."

    "I don't have a choice! Someone's got to, and you're not going to!"

    The vehemence of his reply was almost as shocking to him as it was to Harry.

    "Jesus, Paddler—"

    "It's true. The moment you said no to Dad, it was always going to be me."

    Harry placed his palms together. "Listen to me. It's your life, not his. Do you want his life? Well, do you? Living in a place like Purley with a couple of kids? Is that what you want, catching the same bloody train every morning, moaning about rationing, worrying about your pension . . . screwing your secretary because you don't love your wife anymore?"

    "Don't be ridiculous."

    "Screwing ... your . . . secretary," said Harry with slow deliberation.

    "Dad's not screwing his secretary." "Isn't he?"

    "You're drunk."

    "I wouldn't be telling you if I wasn't."

    Adam eyed his brother for a moment, then laughed. "That's good, Harry. You're still good, I'll give you that." He'd fallen for enough of these in the past to know what was coming next.

    "On Mum's life," said Harry solemnly.

    Adam sobered up fast.

    "His secretary ...?"

    "Vanessaaaaa."

    Vanessa was very smart, very well spoken. Her father was a high-ranking civil servant, and she knew all the dates in the social calendar by heart.

    "The one who likes operaaaaa. You can just see it, can't you? Dad snoring his way through Wagner, then running for the last train home."

    "How do you know?"

    "Mum."

    "She told you?"

    "I asked her. You must have noticed something—the house . . . her hair . . . shoes . . . she's let things go."

    Had he really been that blind?

    "She was asking to be asked."

    Adam dumped himself dejectedly on the bench beside his brother.

    "They've talked about it," said Harry. "He doesn't know what he wants to do."

    "Did he tell her, or did she find out?"

    Somehow it seemed important to know.

    "What do
you
think?"

    "Bastard." "You in thirty years if you're not careful. He made the wrong choice too. Remember how he used to make us laugh? He was a funny man once. How long since he was funny? How long since Mum drew a happy breath?"

    Adam lit a cigarette, then turned to Harry. "The Giant Rat of Sumatra?"

    "Like I said, you're a bright young boy."

    IT WASN'T SURPRISING THAT HE AWOKE SNARLED IN THE sheet. What surprised him was the fact that he'd managed to sleep at all. At some ungodly hour of the night he'd given up even trying to, surrendering to the turmoil in his head.

    He had never glorified his parents' relationship, never held it up to others or himself as a model marriage. But he had always expected it to be there, them to be there, together. It was one of those things you took for granted, like the passing of the seasons. Harry was of the opinion that it was something they had to work out for themselves. Adam's instinct was to head straight home and help in whatever way he could.

    A few hours of welcome oblivion had taken the edge off his panic. It also helped that he had something else to think about from the moment he swung his legs off the bed.

    He was the last to appear at breakfast. Even Antonella was already there. She was as eager as Signora Docci to get going immediately, although they did allow him to throw back a small cup of dense black coffee first.

    His sprained ankle had ballooned grotesquely overnight, and it screamed in protest during the long slow walk down from the villa. His mind, however, was on other things, toying with how best to reveal the story. In the end he just told it the way it was, taking each component of the garden in turn and exposing both its faces.

    Signora Docci fell silent when Adam pointed out the anagram of inferno on the triumphal arch, and she barely spoke from that moment on.

    Dante's
Divine Comedy
was the key text, he explained, not Ovid's
Metamorphoses,
with its tales of gods and goddesses and all their shenanigans. Ovid was a red herring. He was to be ignored.

    The story of Daphne and Apollo in the grotto was little more than a front, a cloak, a disguise. The sculptural arrangement needed to be looked at as a snapshot of a purely human drama: a young couple frolicking merrily while an older gentleman brooded nearby. It had nothing to do with the ancient myth it purported to represent. It was a depiction of Flora and her lover and a disconsolate Federico Docci.

    Harry had provided the breakthrough with his throwaway comment about the look on Flora's face. From her perch on the second level of the amphitheater, the adulterous wife was staring longingly at the distant figure of Apollo in the glade of Hyacinth. Apollo's unmasking as Flora's lover was the key that unlocked the mystery, exposing the whole masquerade. There was another clue to the importance of the sun god in Federico Docci's hidden design: a literary clue buried in the text of
The Divine Comedy,
when, just after he has ascended into Paradise, Dante calls on Apollo for inspiration, to help him in the final stages of his journey.

    What else did the grotto reveal once its characters had been exposed as the three parties to a Renaissance love triangle? There was Federico Docci—in the guise of Peneus—clutching an urn, filling the marble trough with water, which then overflowed into the gaping mouth of Flora, her face set in relief in the floor—no longer a river god providing sustenance to the goddess of flowers, but Federico giving his wife something to drink. What, though? If that symbol of purity, the unicorn bent over the trough, had never possessed its horn, as the sixteenth-century drawing suggested, then whatever it was, it was undrinkable.

    "Poison . . ." said Signora Docci quietly.

    "I think so."

    "But you can't be sure."

    "There's another clue. We'll come to it."

    From the grotto they traveled clockwise around the circuit, stopping at the glade of Adonis, with its sculpture of Venus grieving over her dead love. There was no need to explain the arrangement to Signora Docci and Antonella now that the central conceit of Federico's deception had been laid bare. Ignoring the "official" identities of the characters on show, it was a representation of Flora grieving over
her
dead lover.

    "You think Federico killed him?" asked Antonella.

    "It looks that way. In the myth, Adonis was killed by a wild boar."

    "Our coat of arms . . ." muttered Signora Docci.

    "Exactly."

    Signora Docci appeared a little overwhelmed by the revelation. She said nothing more, but she did pay Adam a heartfelt compliment with her eyes.

    At the foot of the garden stood the Temple of Echo, out the front of which lay Narcissus, peering into the octagonal pool: two youngsters, their love destined to fail, death their reward. If the correspondence was to be believed, Flora—like Echo—had died a slow and lingering death. That poison had been the cause of it was supported by the inscription running around the architrave beneath the dome:
The hour of departure has arrived, and we go our separate ways, I to die, and you to live. Which of these two is better only God knows.
The words were those of Socrates, spoken shortly before he took his own life, poisoning himself with hemlock.

    The glade of Hyacinth, the final element in the garden, mirrored the glade of Adonis on the other side of the valley. But whereas the first glade they had visited portrayed the death of Flora's lover, this one told the death of Flora herself.

    In many ways it was the most interesting part of Federico Docci's carefully constructed program. It revealed the most about the man behind the murders, offering insights into his thinking. Because Federico Docci had found himself faced with a problem.

    It was easy to imagine his predicament.

    The disguise is perfect. The garden he has laid out in loving memory of his wife—the garden he wishes the world to take at face value—is thematically flawless. Flora is made to live again as Flora goddess of flowers. He sets her at the head of the garden, a queen surveying her subjects—Adonis, Narcissus, Hyacinth— each of whose tragic death was marked by the genesis of a flower. Tragedy, Survival, Renewal, Metamorphosis, Death and Resurrection: the themes weave together effortlessly. Only the story of Hyacinth presents a problem.

    It is ideal for his purposes, and certainly too good to consider abandoning. Zephyrus, the west wind, driven mad by his jealousy of Apollo, kills the object of their mutual affections. It's perfect, except for the fact that Hyacinth was a Spartan prince, not a princess. There is a problem with the gender. Federico gets round it by placing Hyacinth face down in the dirt, his/her hair covering his/her face, his/her body draped in a bulky robe.

    It's a cheat, not up to his usual high standards, and Federico knows it. He doesn't mind too much, though, because it obliges him to leave behind a clue—the unusual posing of Hyacinth—and he has to leave at least one clear clue in each section of the garden. That's obviously the challenge he has set himself. He wants people to know the truth, but only once there's little risk to himself. That is surely the reason he waits almost thirty years, till his own life has all but run its course, before laying out the garden.

    There was nothing more for Adam to say, so he fell silent. Harry slung an arm around his shoulder and grinned at the ladies.

    "Not bad, eh? For a young'un."

    "No, not bad at all."

    Antonella was far more fulsome in her praise, proposing a celebratory dinner that evening in honor of Adam's remarkable discovery.

    Adam and Harry assisted a flagging Signora Docci back to the amphitheater, each of them gripping a bony elbow, Antonella bringing up the rear. They speculated about the identity of Flora's lover, concluding that it must surely have been one of the many artists and writers who attended Federico's cultural gatherings at Villa Docci. A younger man, no doubt, more Flora's age than her husband's. Or why not a woman? This was wishful thinking on Harry's part, though not entirely misguided. Tullia d'Aragona, the Roman poetess and courtesan, had disappeared abruptly from the Florentine scene in 1548—the year of Flora's death. Maybe there was a connection, after all. Adam kept these musings to himself.