The Memory Key (39 page)

Loneliness is not your friend. Keep an eye open for when it approaches, disguised as privacy, peace, independence, or freedom. I know you. I knew you.

Filippo.

Chapter 42

She had answered the door thinking it was Elia, back from football.

‘I need my clothes.’

She didn’t like the way he said it. He was full of the sort of aggression he usually reserved for work. His eyes were moving all over her, appraising, judgmental, and analytical, perhaps even lustful – anything but loving. His eyes, which changed colour according to what he wore, sometimes green flecked with shards of blue, sometimes blue flecked with green, were flat grey. She looked down to avoid them, and saw his big scuffed shoes, which caused an unexpected ripple of affection in her chest until he killed it completely by saying, ‘As you can see, I have not put a toe over the threshold.’

She did not want him in, nor did she want to shut the door in his face, so she simply turned and walked into the living room without saying a word.

‘I’m coming in then, all right. Tell me to stop if you want me to stop.’

She was too tired to say anything and remained in silence on the sofa.

His footsteps had a familiar rhythm. He brought with him his familiar smell, too, but it was tinged with something else, as if he had washed his hands or his clothes in a volatile liquid. Alcohol. That was it: a faint taint of alcohol and something else. Something truly unpleasant.

‘I am going into the bedroom, and I am going to fill a case, OK? It will take me no more than two minutes. All my stuff is in two drawers.’ He was speaking to her as if she were immensely stupid, which is how she felt. She had to put his words together one by one and then nod to indicate that she understood what he was saying. But even if she understood the words, she did not quite recognize the person who was speaking them. He disappeared into the bedroom, and true to his word, was back within a matter of minutes, holding a bulging suitcase and, once again, scanning her body rather than looking at her. She took a cushion off the sofa and covered her belly and groin with it.

‘You’re looking well, considering,’ he said.

‘Considering.’

‘The bruise on your face looks like a tan. It almost suits you.’

‘That’s a scary sort of thing to say, Alec.’

‘What is?’

‘That my beat-up face suits me.’

‘But it does, sort of. You look . . .’

Again, he gave her a long appraising look. When he was suspicious, he was capable of looking into her with his gaze, when he was in his ordinary self-obsessed mode, she was invisible. Penetrated or invisible, depending on his mood: the definition of an abusive relationship.

‘Anyhow, I’ve found a place. Well, I think I have.’

She didn’t understand.

‘I mentioned it? I rented out my old place, like you asked. So I can’t go back there.’

‘No, that is one of the forty-three thousand things you have forgotten to mention.’

Blume nodded his head slightly and glanced sideways, which he seemed to think was a more subtle way of expressing exasperation at her distraction than plain eye-rolling. Clearly, she had no right to forget salient events in his life.

‘An African woman,’ he said. ‘I am sure I told you this. Maybe the bang on your head made you forget? Fine woman. Pale little English husband. Like a white grub. You’d wonder what makes two such mismatched people come together.’

‘Utter mystery. So where are you staying?’

‘In a hotel for a while. Nice place. Run by invisible priests.’

The irony in his tone was a relief because it marked a momentary passing of the barely repressed rage that he had brought in with him. She felt the muscles in her arms and neck relax a little, as his voice returned to its normal timbre.

‘You are a fucking bully,’ she told him, stealing some of his rage. ‘You were frightening me. You still are.’

‘Sorry. I don’t mean to.’

‘Men, they do that. They do it all the time. I thought you might be different.’

‘Can I sit?’ asked Blume.

She nodded.

‘I don’t suppose anyone has phoned you, to tell you about Principe.’

‘No, what about him?’

He told her. When he heard her gasp in sympathy, he went on, and in the end, he had told her just about everything that had happened since they last met.

‘I am going to make some tea,’ she said after a while. ‘Do you want some?’

‘Tea?’ Blume had never seen the point in the beverage. ‘Wait!’ He was overcome with a generous impulse. ‘I’ll make it.’

He boiled some water and made a passable attempt at keeping the contempt from his voice, as he kept returning to the living room to read out the names of her teas. ‘Lady Grey, Melissa, Mountain Flower, Darjeeling, English Breakfast, Irish Breakfast . . .’

He did not even harrumph when she asked for honey instead of sugar.

‘Look, I am sorry about Principe,’ she said, taking the cup from him.

‘So am I.’

‘You’re angry, too.’

‘He did it on purpose, basically, but without quite doing it on purpose. I bet when they do the autopsy, they’ll find that his overdose was minimal.’

‘And so now you are rich,’ said Caterina.

‘I would prefer not to talk about it.’

‘You could quit.’

‘So could you. You have money coming your way from that woman, Emma.’

‘We are both suddenly well off,’ she said.

‘Wait till the taxman has a look, and the lawyers, and the Finance Police in the case of Principe’s properties.’

‘You get money, but still no optimism.’

‘It comes from the death of a friend, and it has not arrived, and I am not sure I want it anyway.’

‘Being wealthy is not going to change you in the slightest,’ said Caterina with a laugh. It was the first time she had laughed in days.

She pushed the cushion away. If he had walked over, and lain down beside her and put his head on her stomach, then perhaps everything could be resolved, but she could already feel the return of subdued hostility, basically his default mode. She knew he was angry at being abandoned. It was what made him tick, and Principe had just overwound his mainspring. ‘It’s OK to be angry,’ she said.

‘Don’t give me that psychobabble. I don’t need someone to tell me it’s OK to be angry, any more than I need someone to tell me it’s OK to be hungry, or OK to take a shit.’

‘Forget I spoke.’

‘That wasn’t aimed at you.’

‘Sure it was.’

‘No,’ said Blume. ‘It wasn’t.’

‘Well, then don’t lob fragmentation grenades into conversations and not expect unintended victims.’

‘You’re right.’ He fell silent for a moment, then aimed an idle kick at his suitcase on the floor, and opened his hands. ‘Also, I’m really sorry about what happened . . . I mean the loss, the miscarriage.’

He paused and looked at her, and she covered herself with the cushion again. ‘I should have been there for that,’ he said, though without much conviction in his tone. ‘I should have been there for you, but I especially should have been there for that. But I wasn’t, just as I wasn’t here for Elia, and so I think it’s for the best. I am obviously not cut out to be a good father to anyone.’

Her thoughts exactly, but now that he had voiced them, she was not so sure. If he was capable of acknowledging the problem, maybe he could fix it. She resolved to tell him the truth. She opened her mouth to tell him, and out came different, slyer words. ‘You should have visited, true, but the accident was hardly your fault, was it?’

This was his chance. If she could not depend on his intellectual honesty, then at least she could hope in his investigative intelligence, which surely told him that she would have found out by now. All he had to do was launch into an explanation as to why he went to subvert her witness. She would allow him to be as self-absolving as he wanted. She wouldn’t agree with his motivations, and she did not even expect his defence to be anything but self-serving, but she would be happy to hear him tell her the truth at least about his actions. They could maybe build on that.

If he told her the truth, then she might return the favour. The abruption was under control, they said. There had been no miscarriage. She would almost certainly be able to bring the pregnancy to its full nine-month term.

That was half the truth.

The other half was that she had scheduled a termination of the pregnancy for the following morning.

She could not find the courage to say, ‘I am going to abort your child because I don’t trust you’, but she did have the courage to look straight at him. She was shouting so hard inside her head at him that she felt sure the thought waves had to cross the room and make him see what was at stake. She prayed for him to make the right decision, to look her in the eye and begin his next sentence apologetically, as he shamefully disclosed his pig-headed betrayal that had put her in hospital: ‘As a matter of fact’, or ‘Look, there is something I need to tell you’, or ‘Listen, about that barber . . .’

For God’s sake, Alec, she thought. You think the hospital discharged a woman who had just miscarried after an accident? Look at me sitting here, flushed, plump, my skin shining like butter beneath the bruising, my legs already swollen, my hair lank, my breasts larger. You have been looking at me suspiciously since you came in. You know, even if you don’t know you know.

‘Actually,’ began Blume. ‘There is something – excuse me.’ He pulled his telephone out of his pocket.

‘Don’t answer,’ she said.

‘I have to, it’s Questore De Rossi.’

The conversation was one-sided with Blume replying only in monosyllables. But as she watched the colour draining from his face and his knuckles whitening as they clutched the phone, she realized it could not be good news. Then he started pacing, which meant he was nervous but thinking.

The questore said something else, and any traces of deference in his voice vanished. ‘Do as you fucking see fit, sir’, were his final words.

He shook his head in a gesture of disbelief. ‘Hippy bitch.’

‘And who might this latest object of your hatred be?’

‘Magistrate Alice Saraceno. She ordered a search of Pitagora’s villa this morning. She must have given the order while she was on her way over to Principe’s. Apparently, she thinks she can play me like that.’

‘Why now?’

‘She got a tip-off. Someone phoned up the news desk of
Il Paese Sera
and asked to speak to the crime reporter, and told him to pass on a message to the investigating magistrate in the Manfellotto–Fontana cases. The caller did not specify which magistrate, which may have been a tactic . . .’

He was beginning to speak to himself rather than her.

‘What was the message, Alec?’

‘Oh, right. That the murder weapon was at Pitagora’s.’

‘And was it?’

‘Apparently. Hidden in the garden. Captain Zezza conducted the search in person. They found it cleaned, stripped down, and wiped. But of course that midget De Rossi is furious, because he took a political punt on Pitagora’s innocence, and me. As if I am the one who betrayed him.’

‘So you were wrong?’

Blume crossed his arms and scowled at the floor. ‘It has to be a set-up.’

‘Not wrong, then?’

‘I can’t say for sure,’ said Blume.

‘If De Rossi gambled on you, he should be prepared to take the consequences when he loses,’ said Caterina. ‘I did.’

Chapter 43

The man had a head like a round-nose bullet, and it was as deeply tanned as his arms, face and, Blume imagined, his whole body. This was not the sort of man to have a bikini line, or whatever the male equivalent was. He had even gone to the trouble of oiling and shining his head to give it a coppery sheen. It looked hard and impermeable, as if it had never had a hair follicle. The skin over the skull was taut and youthful, the hand he offered Blume powdery dry, the handshake firm, hard, and decisive. He was wearing cargo pants and a white polo shirt that set off the darkness of his arms.

‘Mr Aquilone? I was looking for your son, Marco,’ said Blume.

By way of reply, the man stepped back and ushered him inside the small apartment, and led him straight into the compact kitchen, whose surfaces gleamed and where not so much as a teaspoon had been left in sight. They sat at a steel-topped table that would not have looked out of place in a morgue, in the middle of which was a white bowl full of green apples.

‘Coffee?’ Mr Aquilone slid open a narrow drawer and extracted a capsule, which he slotted into an espresso machine. He fetched a square white cup. The machine hummed electronically and the coffee trickled down.

‘Long or short?’

‘Ordinary – short. Whatever.’

He handed Blume the cup. ‘No sugar, I’m afraid. No milk either. Lactose intolerance. Anyhow, it spoils the taste. That’s Illy coffee. The guy’s a Communist, but he makes good coffee. So, what rank are you?’

‘Commissioner.’

‘Excellent. What has Marco done?’