A Darkness Descending (22 page)

The grieving widower: Sandro thought of him lying like the dead on the bed, and covered his face briefly with his hand.

Bastone had wanted to talk to him in the early hours.

‘I can’t wake him, no,’ Sandro had said. ‘After the day the man had yesterday? Please. Tell me what it is, Bastone.’

‘There’s been a break-in.’ The lawyer had sounded terrified. ‘At the Frazione’s offices. A lot of mess. I don’t think anything’s gone – but I don’t know. The police called me at midnight.’

In a low voice Sandro had told him to calm down. Another mummy’s boy, this one, another only child. Sometimes it escaped Sandro’s memory that he was one himself: this younger generation seemed, though, to profit less by all that exclusive parental attention.

‘Nothing’s gone? Well then. Someone’ll have been looking for valuables. This kind of thing happens when you hit the headlines. Or – well – someone trying to capitalize on the confusion maybe. It’s possible perhaps a businessman doesn’t like you, sends in a goon or two, some right-wing loner, drunks – could be anyone.’ He had sighed in the dark, warm bedroom, with the unfamiliar smells, another human being in close proximity. A weird time of night.

‘Two in the morning’s not the time to think straight,’ he’d said. ‘Has it been secured? The office?’

‘I got someone out to board it up,’ Bastone had said. Sandro had been surprised the man would even know where to start finding a handyman in the middle of the night. ‘Good,’ he’d said. ‘Look – get some sleep. I’d call Enzo in the morning, if I were you, he’s a sound lad. But not too early, eh?’

It had been impossible for him to get off to sleep after that.

‘She was a good-looking woman,’ said the concierge, studying the newspaper with concentration. Sandro angled his head to get a look at the photograph they’d found of Flavia Matteo; it looked like a passport picture. They must have been quick off the mark. ‘Distinctive.’ The man looked up at him. ‘It’s not a nice business, suicide.’

‘No,’ agreed Sandro, and with the receptionist in his striped waistcoat in front of him, for the first time found himself thinking about whoever it was – bellboy, chambermaid – who’d found Flavia’s body. ‘It’s rough on everyone, that’s for sure.’

‘Never understood it myself,’ Salvatore said, clearing his throat uncomfortably. ‘Leave the world behind? Never.’ Together they stood in the sunlight, feeling its warmth. The street outside was empty, bathed in that clear pale brightness of the seaside, where the streets all end at the water.

‘Nor me,’ Sandro said. ‘Just lucky, I suppose.’ He straightened. ‘When do you go off duty, Salvatore? It is Salvatore, right?’

He inclined his head, acknowledging Sandro’s courtesy. ‘I go off at eight,’ he said. ‘And breakfast is between eight and ten, sir.’

‘Is it a good breakfast?’ asked Sandro. He had never had a good hotel breakfast – it was one reason for staying in hotels as little as possible. Packet croissants and filter coffee. Salvatore gave him a conspiratorial look.

‘Not bad,’ he said, without conviction. ‘Considering. But if I were you I’d head down to the Bar Cristina, on the front, two blocks that way.’ He nodded to the left. ‘They make their own pastries. The coffee’s good. Has the added advantage of Cristina herself.’ And he smiled to himself.

The bar was spacious and bright, filled with the light off the sea. It would have been modern in perhaps 1932 but had been nicely maintained, fitted out in pale green glass. Cristina turned out to be a bustling little woman perhaps five years older than the concierge – Sandro suspected some not inconsiderable history there – with high-piled dark hair and small, shrewd brown eyes.

As she set a
caffe macchiato
and two pastries in front of him, the woman rested her elbows on the counter and regarded him. ‘You’re here with the husband,’ she said. This was a smaller town than Sandro had suspected, for all its sprawl inland; Salvatore must have phoned ahead. ‘Of the suicide. Friend of the family?’

Sandro downed his coffee and took a bite of the pastry. It was stodgy but delicious: he tasted butter and vanilla. ‘Sort of’ he said.

‘That’s nice,’ said Cristina, watching him. ‘A time like that you need friends. Poor kid.’

There it was again, Flavia, who would never grow old. ‘Yes,’ he said, and deciding on impulse to trust her with more than platitudes, ‘we’re trying to work it out. What happened.’ He imagined Luisa in the corner of the room eyeing him and this attractive older woman with sceptical amusement.

‘She must have been desperate,’ said Cristina, and there was something in her voice that made Sandro look into her face, trying to fix her meaning. She started to look away but Sandro held her gaze.

‘She’d been here before,’ Cristina said quickly, and smoothed her apron with a hurried, anxious gesture. ‘I’ve seen her before, in the town. Girl like that? You don’t mistake her. I said to my husband: She’s been here, I don’t know when, don’t know where I saw her …’

Husband? Sandro wondered fleetingly where Salvatore fitted in. ‘She was hardly a girl,’ he said, obscurely trying to retrieve the real, living Flavia Matteo, with that madonna’s pale face, weighed down with worry. He pictured her on that mythical ferryboat, over the dark river, dwindling into a child, when she’d left behind a child of her own. ‘She was forty-two and recently a mother.’

‘Dangerous age,’ said Cristina, frowning.

‘Do you have children, Cristina?’ asked Sandro. The woman raised herself, pulled her apron tight, her bosom – high and round for a woman of her age – seeming to become more prominent.

‘No,’ she said shortly. There was a story here, one that Sandro would never be told. ‘But for any woman – dangerous,’ she insisted, daring him to challenge her. ‘When you know you’re getting – not just older, but old.’

A silence fell: Sandro picked up his second pastry and contemplated it. Luisa was always warning him about diabetes: his own father, wiry into his seventies, had developed it, and no one would call Sandro wiry. He adjusted his waistband downwards and took a bite. Life was too short. There was a contradiction there somewhere.

‘You think she’d been to the town before.’

‘I’m sure I’ve seen her before.’

‘Not in Florence? By all accounts she didn’t get away from the city much.’

Cristina made a face. ‘Florence? I wouldn’t go there if you paid me.’ Out here they were basically Pisans, and the centuries-old hostility between the kingdoms held good. She shook her head. ‘No, I’m here all year round. There’s nothing like it, the seaside. Nothing like it.’ She looked over his shoulder through the wide glass window, where the water glittered in the early light.

‘Might she have come in here? In the bar.’

‘I suppose so.’ Cristina frowned, dubious. She reached under the counter and brought out a cloth. She passed it in a wide arc over the pale blue-green glass, buffing it to a shine. She must have to do that a thousand times a day, thought Sandro, marvelling at the industry required, all for a glass bartop. A woman of standards. The door swung open and a weary-looking woman came in with two small children, chattering insistently. They tugged their mother over to a glass cabinet full of coloured plastic balls and began to wheedle for a coin. Cristina didn’t pay them any attention.

‘It wasn’t in here,’ she said slowly. ‘I’m pretty sure of that, I’m – well. It’s different when you’re at work, you don’t quite have the leisure – and I remember the sunshine. On her hair. Isn’t that peculiar? To remember that,’ she marvelled.

That hair. He’d seen it dull red against the laundered sheet of the morgue. ‘You work every day?’

‘Except Sundays. We’re closed Sundays.’ She brightened. ‘So it’d have been a Sunday, wouldn’t it?’ She looked at him with grudging respect. ‘That’s clever.’

‘Not really,’ said Sandro mildly. ‘Sunshine. How long ago, do you think? A warm day?’

‘We have a six-, seven-month season,’ said Cristina proudly. ‘There are a lot of warm sunny days.’ Behind Sandro the door opened again and he felt the cool early air, heard the shush of waves. Could he and Luisa retire to the sea? People did.

A man in overalls came up to the bar beside Sandro and took off a cap: he brought the whiff of dustbins in with him but Sandro held his ground. Cristina bustled back to the coffee machine and filled a glass with warm milk. A dash of cold coffee from a jug. The man ladled teaspoons of sugar in: two, three, four. A small glass of brandy, and only then did Cristina look back at Sandro.

‘It was a while ago, that’s all I could say. Time does funny things, doesn’t it? As you get older. I think it wasn’t this season. I think—’ She put a hand thoughtfully to her hair, spun like candyfloss. ‘I think I was blonde. Which would make it the end of last season.’

Sandro nodded, careful not to smile. ‘Brunette’s good on you,’ he said, surprising himself.

‘What was she at the Stella Maris for?’ Cristina asked, absently brushing off the compliment. The dustbin man looked up at the name, then back to his
latte macchiato.
‘What a dump that place is. Digusting old Calzaghe, one chambermaid for twelve rooms and her not even an Italian. Not that many are these days.’

You couldn’t stop people saying things like that. It was a small town and even in Florence, the big city swarming with all nationalities, people said such things.

‘And pricey with it. No wonder he can only scrape a handful of guests.’

‘Who knows?’ said Sandro thoughtfully. ‘When you’re planning – well. Perhaps it doesn’t matter.’

‘If it didn’t matter, why didn’t she just lie down on the tracks in Florence? Or walk into the river, if she wanted to spare the train driver. Or the chambermaid, even if she is a Croat. It’s an ugly business, however you do it.’

My sentiments exactly, thought Sandro. And Croats are practically Italians, aren’t they? Spit from Venice and it lands in Croatia.

‘Where is the Stella Maris from here?’ he asked. Cristina drew herself up behind the bar, bosom lifted. She nodded along the seafront. The dustbin man set down his empty brandy glass and wiped his mouth, but didn’t make any move to leave, standing motionless in the full blessing of the sun.

‘Five hundred metres that way,’ said Cristina. ‘Take the right fork down behind the promenade, one street back from the front.’

Sandro nodded, pensive. ‘I don’t know if you’ll find anyone up at this hour,’ she went on, curiously, sliding his empty cup and plate towards her and turning to stack them into a wire basket to go into the dishwasher. ‘Gaetano … that’s Gaetano Tufato, he’ll be the policeman you talked to, can’t keep up with his rank, you’ll have to excuse me on that one. I’ve known him since he was thirteen … Anyway he told me they’d closed the place up for the meantime.’

‘I think he’s a
vice-commissario,’
said Sandro mildly. ‘Tufato, I mean. I wonder why they did that? Are they not sure it was suicide, after all?’

Cristina smiled. ‘I would say,’ she said after a judicious pause, ‘that there’s more than one reason: you know how these things work.’ Sandro seesawed his head. Provincial police? Yes, he knew. ‘First, they don’t like Calzaghe – no one does. They won’t do him any favours. It’s a blot on the seafront, that place, and should be closed down. Then, the woman’s married to a politician, so they’re covering their arses.’

‘Yes,’ Sandro said, almost enjoying this. ‘Who knows when some big cheese might come down to make sure they’ve done things properly?’

‘That’s it,’ said Cristina, head on one side. ‘And – I suppose there’s always some doubt. A girl – young woman – dying like that. Do you think it was suicide? I mean, you knew her.’

‘I didn’t know her,’ said Sandro, and suddenly he felt sad. ‘I didn’t know her at all.’

It wasn’t until the dustbin man cleared his throat that Sandro realized he was still there. ‘I’ll show you where the Stella Maris is,’ he said. ‘It’s on my way.’

*

The day had dawned cool and bright and it was still early when Giuli found herself standing on the pavement outside the small primary school – the Scuola Elementare Agnesi, tucked behind Piazza Santo Spirito – where Flavia Matteo had worked. Term, Giuli calculated, would only just have started, and the place had the air of barely having woken up again after the long summer’s desertion. A battered double door stuck with posters and a peeling wall daubed with graffiti, a railing above it through which the green curls and tendrils of a climbing plant wound themselves. The children hadn’t arrived yet and it was quiet, but Giuli often passed this way during the day and if she paused and listened she could hear them behind the elegant building’s thick, five-hundred-year-old walls, through the long windows with their flaking paint and battered shutters, the unselfconscious piping voices of small children.

She could picture their hands up, eager for attention. Giuli had been to one school she’d loved, before it all went wrong – the first, the nursery.
Scuola materna
, the right sort of name. There’d been a teacher whose breast she’d once – aged four perhaps – brushed against and been so startled by its warmth and fullness that she’d pressed harder. Her own mother being so thin from self-neglect, Guili had marvelled at the feel of it, not daring to move away, and the teacher, if she’d noticed, had not moved away either but instead rested an arm lightly on her shoulder, keeping her safe. Giuli still marvelled at it, sometimes, the yearning persistence of that small physical memory. She wondered what kind of teacher Flavia Matteo had been.

The poster-stuck door opened abruptly outwards and the bristles of a broom emerged behind a small cloud of dust. As the dirt settled on the pavement a broad-faced woman in a janitor’s coat appeared in the doorway, big hands resting on her broomhandle. She stared levelly at Giuli and it occurred to her that the janitor was primed to watch out for child molesters. Something Clelia had said blinked in the back of Giuli’s mind, something about abuse.

‘Yes?’ said the woman. ‘Did you want something?’

Giuli pulled from her pocket the paper where she’d scribbled the half-dozen names Sandro had texted her, from Flavia Matteo’s phone. ‘Um – are any of these in yet?’ she asked, holding the paper out to the janitor. The woman stared.