A Fine and Private Place E-Book

Christobel Kent

• Herausgeber: Atlantic Books
• Kategorie: Krimi
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2010

Beschreibung

As Sandro gets to grips with the dispiriting realities of life as a private detective, touting for business among old contacts and following errant teenagers, an old case comes back to haunt him... As Sandro Cellini gets to grips with the dispiriting realities of life as a private detective, touting for business among old contacts and following errant teenagers, an old case comes back to haunt him... Once the subject of a routine investigation back in Sandro's early days as an investigator, Loni Meadows - the glamorous, charming and ruthless director of an artistic Trust based in a castle in the hills outside Florence - is found dead in circumstances Sandro cannot convince himself are accidental. However inconvenient his suspicions might be, both to Sandro - whose marriage appears to be disintegrating - and to Meadows's erstwhile employers at the Trust, he presses ahead with the case. And as Sandro attempts to uncover the truth of Loni Meadows's violent and lonely death, he finds himself drawn into the lives of the castle's highly strung community and the closed world they inhabit in the Casentino's isolated hills.

Leseprobe

A Fine and Private Place

Christobel Kent is the author of five novels: A Time of Mourning, A Party in San Niccolò, Late Season, The Summer House and A Florentine Revenge. She lives near Cambridge with her husband and five children.

Copyright

First published in Great Britain in 2010 by Atlantic Books, an imprint of Grove Atlantic Ltd.

Copyright © Christobel Kent, 2010

The moral right of Christobel Kent to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Acts of 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities, is entirely coincidental.

First eBook Edition: January 2010

ISBN: 978-1-848-87754-2

Atlantic Books

An imprint of Grove Atlantic Ltd

Ormond House

26–27 Boswell Street

London

WC1N 3JZ

www.atlantic-books.co.uk

Contents

Cover

A Fine and Private Place

Copyright

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-One

Chapter Twenty-Two

Chapter Twenty-Three

Chapter Twenty-Four

Chapter Twenty-Five

Chapter Twenty-Six

For Ilsa

The grave’s a fine and private place,

but none, I think, do there embrace.

Andrew Marvell, ‘To His Coy Mistress’

THEY CRESTED THE HILL to see the winter sun hovering on the far horizon, a wide vista of pale grey hills and leafless woodlands ahead and the dark ribbon of a river threading the valley floor below. The driver braked abruptly on the rise and a cloud of dust rose behind them, enveloping the big brute of a car. He turned towards his passenger and with a sweeping gesture bestowed upon him all that they surveyed.

‘Here,’ he said, in English so heavily accented that even that single syllable was barely recognizable. ‘Castello Orfeo. Welcome.’ And he smiled, a flat smile that didn’t reach his eyes, a glint of gold far back in his mouth.

Beside him the traveller looked down an avenue of dusty black cypresses that dipped and rose straight ahead of them, bisecting the landscape and ending in dark woods from which rose the grey stone flanks of a handsome fifteenth-century castle: steep, solid and unadorned. Not strictly speaking a fortress but a keep, even in the last rosy tint of a fading winter afternoon, the Castello Orfeo, uncompromising as it had always been, made no attempt to endear itself to its newest guest.

She was waiting for them, the massive fortified doorway in which she stood emphasizing the daintiness of her figure, her girl’s shoulders, her tiny ankles. The huge, luminous blue eyes gazing at him; the cloud of red-gold hair. She held out her delicate painter’s hands towards him, and the flicker of a satisfied smile settled on her lips.

‘Mr Fairhead,’ she said for the benefit of a small, impromptu reception committee. A tall girl in an apron stood at the back; she had long, black, centre-parted hair, and her face was the perfect, pale, melancholy oval of a country Madonna. And with her were the other guests, whose company Alec Fairhead completed: two men besides him, and two women. All present and correct. ‘We are so very honoured.’

Anyone looking at Alec Fairhead in the rapidly growing dusk might have been forgiven for thinking that all he wanted to do was to turn and climb back into the car and tell the driver with his gold tooth to get him out of there. But as everyone waited on the new arrival’s response to the Director’s greeting, darkness had fallen behind him across the wide, dusty landscape and it was too late.

Chapter One

AT THE WHEEL OF his dark and silent car half an hour before a February dawn, Sandro Cellini sat up a side street in a southern suburb of Florence, thinking about his wife. Luisa.

He should have been thinking about the job, but then not wanting to think about the job was part of the problem.

For three days Sandro Cellini had been paid to follow a seventeen-year-old girl to her upmarket school in the city, and then home again. Her parents thought she had got into drugs, and they wanted to know who was leading her astray. Carlotta Bellagamba was an only child – a ‘precious’ child, as the euphemism went; conceived through medical intervention.

So far: nothing. Friday night was often, according to her parents, the night Carlotta stayed out till the early hours, and today was indeed Friday, but Sandro had no great hopes. Not in life, nor of making any significant discovery that would help Carlotta and her parents understand one another better.

It was the modern world: parents so busy or so nervous they paid a private detective to watch their kid, rather than tackle their own flesh and blood head-on. Children too precious to be allowed a wild moment or two, but that wasn’t Sandro’s decision to make; he was just the hired hand. As Sandro’s part-time assistant Giuli Sarto had put it succinctly, what else was the precious child to do but go off the rails? An open and shut case.

Children. Having none of his own, Sandro was all too well aware he was not in a position to judge. What kind of a parent would he have made, anyway? Taciturn, like his own father, anguished, like his mother, worn down with work and worry? He couldn’t really even begin to think about how much they would have loved a child, he and Luisa. The fine detail of it: the first day at school, seeing a child learn to ride a bicycle or play football. Rebellious teenagers, thinking they know it all, a girl like Carlotta making a face at her stupid old dad.

The girl’s home was up a leafy side-turning; a handsome two-storey villa – three if you counted the garage and cellar beneath the raised ground floor. It was perhaps twenty years old, with a terrace, a verandah, five olive trees in the front garden, a fronded palm to the rear and two shiny cars in a garage. The job was not a complicated one; it was nursemaiding, pure and simple. The problem was that Sandro didn’t want to be a nursemaid. For thirty years a police officer, with all the dirt and boredom that entailed, at least he ’d been a man.

‘It’s bound to start slowly,’ his ex-partner Pietro had warned, the man with whom he ’d shared a squad car for fifteen years. The life of the private investigator would be like that of any other freelance; he ’d just have to adjust.

Only it hadn’t started slowly, not at all. More than a year before, his first case had flung him in at the deep end with the search for a wayward English girl whose parents didn’t seem even to give much of a damn that she might be dead, and a grieving wife pleading with him to make sense of the suicide of her husband. Flailing about in the worst weather the city had seen in forty years, Sandro had found himself fighting from the outset – with his old colleagues in the Polizia di Stato, with the disbelieving arrogance of the rival force, the Carabinieri, with the expectations of the bereaved and, most of all, with himself. With his own new status: private investigator. Lowest of the low, without a badge or comrades, doffing his cap to people he despised, holding his tongue when he wanted to shout the place down.

It wasn’t as if there was anyone else he could blame for his dismissal from the Polizia. Some might have called it no more than an indiscretion, a misdemeanour, even a good deed, passing information to a murder victim’s father. But he ’d broken the rules. Other men might have fought it, clung on to their job for the pension and a warm office in which to sit out the last five years of their working life. Not Sandro.

He had found the English girl, alive, just about. He ’d nailed her abductor. He ’d unpicked the terrible truth behind the architect Claudio Gentileschi walking into the river and leaving his wife to go on alone, and he ’d gone to his doubters and he ’d proved to them that he knew what he was doing. Proving it to himself was still a way off.

And then it had all gone quiet. The floodwaters had receded, winter set in. Christmas came and went and Sandro sat in his quiet office in San Frediano, watching the thin sunlight move from one side of the room to the next and wondering if the phone would ever ring again.

In January, after a month of twiddling his thumbs, he ’d forced himself to sign up for a computer course; the rudiments. How to retrieve data, how to tell if a machine has been wiped. It had taught him how little he knew, mostly.

There had been two weeks’ work in March, following an elderly baker’s young Chilean wife to find out if she was having an affair or not. Not, as it turned out, though she did have a daughter she was keeping secret from him. She ’d thought the baker wouldn’t marry her if she had a child. Would it all end well? Sandro had no way of knowing; stepfathers, in his professional experience, were not reliably kind to their charges. But that was not his business, once the case was closed.

In April, some protection work for the owner of a small chain of garages in the suburbs, a month of accompanying the man – a crude, arrogant piece of work – around the city collecting earnings, while his regular guard was recuperating from a gunshot wound. Sandro hadn’t told Luisa about the gunshot wound. In June, after a month of twitchy idleness in the crowded city, an Italian-American Trust running a castle in the Maremma had been put on to him by some ancient contact in the British Council. The Trust – an artistic community of some kind – had asked him to do a decidedly pointless bit of background checking on an employee; practically a handout. Was this, he wanted to ask Pietro, as they sat shoulder to shoulder in the friendly, workmanlike bustle of the bar they ’d used to go to as working police officers, Pietro’s blue cap between them on the table, was this how it was going to be? Fag-ends and vanity work, waiting for those scraps to fall from the rich man’s table?

As the engine ticked down in the dark, frosty air, the interior of the car grew cold; Sandro opened the flask he had filled with hot tea. On the top floor of the Bellagamba house a light came on behind the frosted glass of a bathroom window: someone was up.

Another light went on downstairs. Did the mother get up first? Did she pad into the warm kitchen in her dressing-gown to make her husband some coffee? And all over again Sandro was not thinking about the job but about Luisa. His wife, with whom he had not shared breakfast for more than a month. What with one thing and another.

When they ’d said goodbye outside the bar, Pietro had taken hold of his shoulders in a quick, fierce hug: not like him at all.

He ’d said, ‘It’s good if you find you’ve got time on your hands, Sandro. Luisa needs you now.’

Luisa had needed him, when she got ill. Now he wasn’t so sure.

People had rallied round. If you ’d asked Sandro before Luisa got her diagnosis, he ’d have said they had a handful of friends, no more. But when word got around Luisa had been in hospital, men, women and children would be stopping him in the street to ask if they were OK, if they needed anything. Even the taciturn newspaper seller was searching out freebies for them from the back of his kiosk; restaurant guides, maps of Sicily, dog-eared postcards. Luisa had got tired of it quite quickly; she ’d just wanted to get back to work, and anything that smelled of charity made her irritable.

After the operation in November fifteen months earlier, Luisa had taken a month off, December, for the chemo, and though they ’d continued the course through January and February, by then she ’d had enough of sitting at home twiddling her thumbs. She only took the Friday and Saturday off each week: Friday to have the drugs, Saturday to lie down in a darkened room while he fed her dry biscuits and camomile tea because just lifting her head off the pillow made her throw up. And Sunday to snap at Sandro all morning, although by the evening she ’d have softened and become tearful; he wasn’t sure which was more difficult to handle.

And Monday she ’d be back at work, reliable solid Luisa on the shop floor at Frollini, in the shadow of the Palazzo Vecchio, selling 500-euro shoes to pretty, spoilt women from across the world; unfailingly polite, occasionally generous with her discount, irreducibly proud of her wares. Not so solid as she used to be; the chemo had shaved a few kilos off her, and the surgery had taken one of her breasts and left a foam-rubber prosthesis in its place. They ’d talked about reconstruction at the hospital, but Luisa’s face had turned blank and stubborn at the mention of more surgery, any more time spent in the hospital than was strictly necessary to save her life; the prosthesis would do fine.

There ’d been a check-up in late March, an unseasonably hot day out at Careggi, the two of them waiting for an hour and a half in a Portakabin that was serving as a temporary clinic. Sandro had tried to hold his wife’s hand but she ’d been impatient with him; it was too hot, she ’d said. When they ’d finally got into the consulting room there ’d been a rash close to the scar line that might have been a cause for concern, but it had turned out to be the heat; nothing to worry about. Another check-up in September had been clear; we’ll leave it nine months till the next one, they ’d said.

Next to that piece of news, of course – the outcome so covertly longed for he still hardly dared believe it – work didn’t matter. Shouldn’t matter. But Sandro hated not being able to provide; he didn’t want Luisa having to worry about money.

In the quiet suburban street – quiet but for that ceaseless hum of drones on their way in to the city – the light was grey still. The sun was no more than a lemon-yellow glow behind the eastern hills, but the sky was clear, only a couple of wispy scraps of cloud to the east, tinged with pink. It was very cold.

Sandro took a slug of his cooling, sugary tea, pulled on his gloves, and rubbed his upper arms vigorously. He felt as though he was in a kind of no man’s land, in this anonymous street where it was neither day nor night. The invisible man. A useful quality in a private detective, perhaps, if not in life.

‘Take her away for a break,’ Pietro had said.

All year, since the chemo finished, he ’d been asking her: fancy a trip up to the Cinque Terre, for Easter? Maybe we could go down to Puglia again, for summer?

‘Let’s wait till after the next check-up,’ it had been to start with, then, ‘Not now.’ Frollini had stayed open all August, and she wasn’t going anywhere. Her boss, smooth old Frollini himself, older than Sandro but in better nick, had told Luisa she was the jewel in his crown.

‘We can’t afford it,’ had been Luisa’s weary trump card.

Because you’re not earning, are you? Not really. That was what she had not said.

Before this job had got him out of the house by six, Sandro had lain awake every morning thinking what he ’d say to her, if he was brave enough.

I don’t want you seeing more of your boss than you do of me, he ’d say. I want my coffee at home, at the kitchen table with you in your big white dressing-gown fussing about at the stove.

I want it to be like it used to be.

But now it was too late, wasn’t it? Sandro always seemed to be one step behind; while he was still working out how to talk to his own wife, things had taken a new turn at Frollini. Luisa was going places, and he was going to be left behind.

And suddenly there was action. Up ahead the girl banged out of her front door, shouting something over her shoulder into the dark house. In a tight plaid bomber jacket, tighter jeans, sheepskin boots and fingerless gloves, she hauled a bright pink Vespa out from under the verandah’s overhang, dropped the satchel into a top-box, reached down for a helmet, wheeled the vehicle at a run out into the road and was off.

Sandro’s day had begun.

Chapter Two

IT ONLY CAME INTO view at the last minute, shielded from her by the mass of willows that grew up beside the river; Caterina Giottone only saw it in time to do a little swerve and wobble on the motorino, and she was safely past. The high, white flank of a truck, lifting equipment on its flatbed, the flicker of red and white tape; intent on getting to work, she didn’t look back, so that was all she saw. Then she hit the patch of ice and it was just as well she hadn’t been craning her neck to look behind her or she ’d have been on the tarmac with a broken bone or two.

The scooter steadied when she changed down a gear. Hunched over the handlebars, Caterina – Cate to her friends – crept up the hill. It was cold; oh, Jesus God, it was cold.

It was so cold that even through her layers of fleece and wool and leather, Cate could no longer feel her toes. The defined ridges of her cheekbones, exposed to the breathtaking, knife-sharp chill, felt as though they had been flayed. As her motorino sputtered to the crest of the hill, Orfeo finally came into view and Cate reflected, as she did on her way to her place of work most mornings, that it was nothing like home.

It was partly the geography. Cate had grown up in the wide, flat Val di Chiana, where you could see for miles and everywhere you looked there was habitation: the great grazing plains of the Chianina cattle punctuated by square, turreted farmsteads, hay-barns and, increasingly, by capannoni, the low grey hangars of light industry. The closest hills to Cate’s home village were soft and round and topped with towns and bell-towers, their slopes clustered with restaurants and bars and crowds of teenagers.

This place was a different matter, the Etruscan Maremma; two hours to the south, yet the hills were rocky, barren, inhospitable and wild, surmounted by the occasional bleached and silent village. To a town girl like Cate it seemed so empty, dusty and brown and bare and wild in the depths of winter, the leafless trees and desiccated brambles clinging like cobwebs to their slopes. Cate had been renting a room in the closest town to the castle, a flyblown place on the edge of the plains called Pozzo Basso, and on her eight-kilometre motorino ride in to work, she passed only the occasional farmhouse as she wound through the silent hills.

Some of them had become ruins, overrun with wild vines, re-absorbed by the landscape. They gave Cate a chill, the half-discernible mounds beneath ivy, the scattered stones, like half-buried bodies. They made her think, how quickly a human being would disappear.

They called the castle quite simply Orfeo, though what remained of the Orfeo family themselves were holed up in Florence in their luxurious villa, the castle being too uncomfortable, too draughty, too expensive to heat. Most of the staff, unlike Cate, were locals, their families associated with the place for generations, and the Trust meant nothing to them; the prodigal son who had crossed the Atlantic in the thirties, made his money in steel during the war and then returned, in awe of the American way, to set up an English-speaking artists’ retreat. They tolerated the Trust, run from offices in Baltimore, but fifty years didn’t count for much in this landscape, pitted with Etruscan caves, where even the Romans were relative newcomers.

Ginevra the cook had once expressed surprise that Cate didn’t commute from home, if she didn’t want to live in; she was of a generation for which it would be entirely natural for a twenty-nine-year-old unmarried woman to live with her parents – or, in her case, mother and stepfather – even if it meant a long drive to work. But Cate, who had spent most of her teenage years arguing with the stubborn, old-fashioned man her worn-out mother had married when Cate’s father left them, had not lived at home now for more than ten years. She had worked on the cruise ships off the Florida coast, restaurants on the Côte d’Azur, even a coffee bar in Bath, England, but this place – the Castello Orfeo, two hours’ drive from where she ’d been born – sometimes seemed the most foreign of them all.

And this morning more than most, Cate was wondering whether the fact was, she simply didn’t belong here. Had this been coming a long time? Perhaps; the winter season was certainly harder going than the summer; the guests wondering what they were doing in the middle of nowhere, in the cold and the rain; this wasn’t the Italy they ’d signed up for. But yesterday had been a tough one; yesterday everything had seemed to turn sour. Yesterday, nothing had gone right.

On a sharp, wooded bend the convex mirror that discreetly marked the rear entrance to the castle came into view. Cate turned across the bend between the trees and revved to get the little Vespa over the stones and rubble of the rear access road. Visitors and guests were not encouraged to use this route, though it represented a considerable shortcut: there was no view, no avenue of trees, no framing of the castle’s lovely, forbidding profile, and the terrain was rough. This way, one approached through a gloomy thicket of overgrown holm-oak trees, and the flank of the castle loomed up quite suddenly overhead.

There was a small clearing in the trees marked by a flagpole where the staff ’s assorted vehicles were parked, out of sight, and Cate dismounted and pushed her moped into the space unofficially reserved for her. Down to her right was the laundry building, and the studio apartment, where the curtains were firmly drawn; it would be a while before that one was up. In her pocket, her mobile tinkled its merry little ringtone. Vincenzo.

She tugged off her helmet and set the mobile to her ear. ‘V’cenz. Caro.’

They hadn’t been together so long; five months. He ’d met her in the late-night supermarket in Pozzo where he worked, buying herself some beers on the way back to the bedsit she rented over a biker bar. Vincenzo was younger, by a year or two, and he had led a quiet life. He looked at Cate and she knew he saw a girl who had travelled the world, who had earned her independence, who drank beer on her own late at night; his eyes shone when he looked at her. He was sweet, mostly.

‘Yeah,’ she said, in response to his question. ‘Just arrived. Fine, yeah, I’m fine.’

She ’d told him her troubles last night, and he was looking out for her, that was all, even if it felt oppressive. Turning to register that the gardener’s pick-up was parked in its usual place, she said, ‘Mauro’s back.’

Vincenzo was on the early shift and she knew he ’d be at the till, between customers; he wanted to know if he could see her tonight, making his case. Really what he wanted, Cate knew, was to move in with her; she let him talk, looking around her absently. If the pick-up was evidence, then the surly Mauro, factotum, handyman and gardener, had returned – to the Director’s fury, he ’d spent all yesterday helping a farmer haul cattle out of a stream on the other side of the valley. But something was different; she didn’t yet know what it was. The phone wedged under her ear as Vincenzo talked, Cate opened the shiny box on the moped’s rear and pulled out the bulging canvas satchel she took to work. Her fingers felt like frozen sausages, even inside the gloves.

‘OK, darling,’ she said gently, ‘tonight, should be great. Can I call you though? Got to get inside, I’m freezing. Un bacio, OK?Un bacio.’ Grumbling, he let her go, and Cate hurried under the trees towards the castle.

Even though it was six months since she had started at Orfeo, Cate still did not quite understand its principles. Between five and ten guests arrived every ten weeks, all – or almost all – single people, and all creative people of one kind or another. You could have described them as artists, Cate supposed, but while she always thought of artists as painters or sculptors, Orfeo’s guests might be poets or writers of novels or plays, or they might make tiny indistinct objects out of feathers and clay or compose operas using the sounds of underwater creatures.

Whatever they did, they were disposed around the place, accommodated in the castle’s apartments and outbuildings for those ten weeks, fed and watered; they were entertained, now and again, with expeditions here and there, to galleries or churches, or by visiting speakers. Cate had always assumed they were here to work, but some of them seemed to do nothing at all, and certainly no proof of achievement was ever demanded of them. Put frankly, Cate knew nothing about art. And this lot – well. They were an alien species to her. But then again – a couple of Americans, an English novelist, a Norwegian poet – Cate reflected, as she headed round the walls for the castle kitchen, that wasn’t so surprising. They were foreign.

There were often a couple of Italians too – although this time only one, and as he was from Venice he was exotic enough to a girl from the landlocked plains of the Val di Chiana – but even they were supposed to conduct every conversation in English, the castle’s official language. The Norwegian and the young American woman, who both wanted to improve their language skills, occasionally tried to engage the staff and the Italian guests in their own language, but it was frowned upon. Cate couldn’t find fault with the house language rule, because it was the reason she, an outsider, had been brought in. Her English, and her calm, quiet way with funny foreigners, learned on the cruise ships. But this rule, like so many others, was weird; it made the place like a strange kind of island state among the lonely hills. In fact, what Orfeo seemed most like to Cate sometimes, with its prohibitions and punishments, its smiling, implacable headmistress, was a boarding school, or a prison.

The kitchen and dining room were housed in the old stable block that clung to the rear of the castle, its blind side, and there was a staff entrance in the wall that enclosed the complex, then a small stretch of close-cropped lawn. The vents from the room that housed the castle’s heating system were billowing steam, and the grass was crunchy with frost under her heavy boots. The door to the kitchen was ajar. Cate heard the voices and she stopped, her bag slung over her shoulder, her breath clouding in front of her, and listened.

There were too many voices, and they were raised too high. The Director didn’t like racket, particularly not Italian racket. Cate had been brought in after a kitchen girl – waitress was too modern a word, it seemed, for the castle’s image, everything had to have the mediaeval touch – had muttered something rude in Italian to an American woman. Not even a guest, but a guest’s wife, visiting for the evening. The girl had been dismissed; apparently she ’d shouted across her shoulder all the way out, her rough, defiant Tuscan accent resounding around the courtyard.

So it was unusual to hear this kind of clamour of heedlessly raised voices; even if there was a row – and there were plenty – it would without fail be conducted in a kind of hissing, spitting, under-the-breath mode. So: something had happened.

Cate liked to know what she was walking into, so she stayed still on the crisp frosted grass, thinking. From the other side of the hill, from the little huddle of farm buildings where the others lived, the dogs bayed, the sound bouncing across the slopes. That first sight of Orfeo from the crest of the hill had been different somehow this morning. In her mind’s eye Cate checked off the detail of what she ’d registered: trees, the dark, crenellated silhouette, the windows too mean and narrow for the façade, and the great gate into the courtyard standing open. Was that the cause of the commotion?

Still out of view of the kitchen door, Cate backed away, retracing her steps quietly to the small gate that would lead her back outside the walls. They were kind enough to her in there, but she was an outsider still. She needed to be prepared. She looked at her watch; it was barely eight o’clock and she was still early for work. Standing there another minute, she looked back where she ’d come from, took in the trees, her motorino, Mauro’s pick-up and Ginevra’s Punto, the granary, the flagpole. The flag had been lowered; she ’d never seen it like that before: that was one thing, certainly, even if she couldn’t see the significance of it. And she registered that the castle’s big 4x4 was nowhere to be seen. The Monster, they called it, Il Mostro.

Well, thought Cate, puzzled, nothing much then. An open gate; Il Mostro out on some jaunt. Had the Dottoressa been going somewhere last night, after dinner, in the car she seemed to treat as her personal property? Or this morning, even? But it was too early for her to be up and about, and anyway Cate glimpsed something now, in the gap in the trees a hundred metres away where the main drive led to the great gate.

A low blue shape. A police car.

And she ran across the frosty grass to the door, bursting into the kitchen as though she ’d just arrived, and they all fell silent.

Chapter Three

AS SANDRO DROVE ALONG the Via Senese in the grey dawn light, keeping the pink Vespa in his sights, he was on autopilot. After three days he could have done it blindfold: Sandro had always had a knack for navigation. If not for negotiation.

Last night he and Luisa had talked about the job, which had surprised Sandro. Delighted him, to start with.

She had already been home when he walked in, at 7.30.

He ’d followed the girl to school, where she had remained all day; he ’d followed her home again. He ’d followed her to a bar in Galluzzo where she ’d had hot chocolate with three girlfriends, then she ’d gone back to the house.

Luisa had been cooking polpettone, and the mingling smells of veal and pork and herbs and wine issuing from the oven had lifted his spirits higher than they ’d been for weeks. He had put his arms around her gratefully at the stove, and she ’d turned and pecked him quickly on the cheek before returning to her pans.

Sandro had sat at the table, and poured himself a glass of the Morellino di Scansano he ’d picked up from the wine shop in Via dei Serragli on the way home, as a celebratory gesture; a job was a job. The owner, a tall, husky blonde he occasionally wondered about – her voice too deep, her Adam’s apple too prominent – had recommended it; she, or he, had excellent taste.

Luisa had opened the window to pull the shutters to, and he ’d seen her shiver in the icy air. Something about the chemo had returned her to the menopause, and she was still prone to tearing off cardigans in a sweat.

‘You’ll catch your death,’ he ’d said, in exasperation.

‘I’m all right,’ she ’d said impatiently, then seemed to relent. She ’d pulled on a sweater that was draped across the back of a chair; Sandro didn’t remember having seen it before. Cinnamon-coloured, fine merino. Expensive looking. If Luisa had felt his eyes on her, she hadn’t acknowledged it.

‘Nice sweater,’ he ’d said mildly.

‘Isn’t it?’ she ’d said, offhand. ‘Old stock, hardly cost anything.’

He should have been glad she was taking pride in her appearance. ‘You look beautiful,’ Sandro had said awkwardly. ‘My beautiful wife. Come and have a glass with me.’

‘In a minute,’ she ’d said, her back to him again and stirring something in a pan.

‘What are you making now?’ he ’d asked.

‘Just some ragu. For the freezer. Thought I might as well, while I was at it. Bought twice the quantities at the market.’

Something about this cooking marathon had begun to unsettle Sandro. But before he ’d been able to formulate his unease Luisa had pulled off the apron and was in the chair beside him. Her skin bright against the fine brown wool of the new sweater, she ’d raised the glass Sandro had poured her.

They ’d talked about Carlotta, and Sandro had felt the wine and the warmth of Luisa’s attention mellow him. Lull him.

‘Sounds like a normal teenager to me,’ Luisa had said.

‘We never took drugs,’ Sandro had replied. He ’d been twenty or so when he met Luisa; close enough to Carlotta’s age.

‘Things were different then,’ Luisa had said, the ghost of a smile on her lips. ‘We had no money.’

She ’d taken a tiny sip of her wine; Sandro knew she ’d read somewhere that more than a glass a day increased your chances of breast cancer. She ’d never been a drinker, never; he ’d wanted to say, there’s no reason to it, cara. Don’t look for a reason.

‘There’s that,’ he ’d said. ‘True, we had no money.’ Not that we’ve got much more now. ‘But there were no drugs, either, not like there are these days.’

Luisa had given him a sharp look. ‘Not so many,’ she ’d said. ‘But they were around.’

‘How would you know?’ Sandro had been taken aback. His wife shrugged, and it came to him that her shoulders were as slender now as they had been when they ’d first been courting. She raised an eyebrow, gave him a sly smile.

‘When I first started work – there were girls who took – certain pills. Drugs that kept them slim. The American students brought plenty over, amphetamines, I suppose. They called them speed. Don’t you remember the jazz club behind the station?’ Her eyes dancing, with mischief, or nostalgia.

And Sandro had remembered it, though he hadn’t thought about the place in thirty years; not that he ’d ever been inside it when it was open. It had been closed down in the late sixties, boarded up and derelict until it reopened as a discount shoe store a couple of decades later. The Gatto Nero.

‘Did you ever go there?’ he ’d asked her curiously. ‘To the Gatto?’ Thirty years, and still there were things he didn’t know about Luisa.

‘Once or twice. The photographer took me there.’

The photographer had predated Sandro; he ’d been twenty years older than Luisa and a friend, not a boyfriend. Sandro had been bitterly jealous of the man all the same; it had only occurred to him when he was in his fifties himself that the photographer, now long dead, had almost certainly been gay. Luisa had adored the man; that was all Sandro knew.

It was an age since they ’d talked like this. Their marital speciality had been peace and quiet. And not since long before the cancer had they gone over old, old, times. Sandro had known he should go with the flow, enjoy it, but he could not, quite. What did it mean?

‘An only child,’ Luisa had said, shaking her head. ‘They’re all only children these days. A recipe for disaster.’

‘Don’t know about that,’ Sandro had said ruminatively. He hadn’t told her how the child had been conceived; the precious child. Would they have had a child of their own, he and Luisa, if they ’d ever overcome their shame and consulted the experts? They ’d never know.

‘I suppose they’re only doing the right thing, nip it in the bud if she is into drugs,’ he ’d continued. He ’d thought of the girl giggling with her friends over hot chocolate. ‘Though so far she hasn’t put a foot wrong. End of the week generally, though, that’s when she goes out, Thursday, Friday: last night she stayed in.’ He had shot Luisa a glance. ‘So I guess I’ll be late back tomorrow.’

Luisa had nodded, looked suddenly anxious.

‘She’s a nice kid,’ Sandro had said, touched. ‘She’ll be all right.’

‘Good,’ Luisa had said, giving him a little pat, getting back to her feet. On the table her glass had been barely touched.

‘So what’s this all about?’ Sandro had inquired as he bent to check on the progress of the polpettone.

‘What?’ Luisa had said over her shoulder.

‘This cooking frenzy,’ he ’d said, smiling. ‘Not that I’m complaining.’

He hadn’t really thought there would be a reason. But there was.

‘Lay the table,’ she ’d said, ‘and I’ll tell you.’

He ’d known he wouldn’t like it.

Just outside the city walls the pink Vespa went across a big junction on amber, and Sandro jumped the red after her, because suddenly he just didn’t care. A delivery van blared his horn, cutting behind him, and Sandro didn’t even look round.

The sun was just up, topping the hills of the Casentino to the east, shining down the silver length of the Arno as he wound under the huge umbrella pines that lined the Viale Michelangelo. They were almost there; ahead of him Carlotta Bellagamba slowed, the little Vespa swaying, as if she too was taking in the view. As if she too was brought up short by it, their staggering city. The low, flat sun gleamed off the golden ball that topped the vast red dome of Santa Maria del Fiore, and beyond it to the south-west the distant Appennines were dusted with snow.

The pink Vespa darted to the left at the last minute; an old man in a hat and overcoat hopped angrily out of the way. Sandro took the turn in leisurely pursuit.

The school – the Liceo Classico Marzocco – was the best, naturally enough. The high plastered walls that lined the street – no more than a country lane, it might seem to the outsider, with overhanging wisteria and magnolia – concealed some of the most exclusive properties in the city. Ahead of Sandro his target was slotting her Vespa into a long row of mopeds in front of a pristine façade, as she ’d done every day he ’d been watching her.

Sandro drove on at a sedate pace, and once out of sight he pulled up in someone’s drive and hopped out.

The pavement outside the school was crowded now with students smoking and chatting, stamping their feet in the cold and laughing before going inside. They were leaving it to the last moment; it was gone eight now. Sandro walked slowly so as to give himself time to pick Carlotta out. He had to step off the pavement, it was so crowded, and then a shiny, powerful new Audi forced him back into the crowd, coming to a halt right in front of the school gates. A handsome, moustachioed older man in an impeccable suit – a bit of a Frollini, thought Sandro, 1,000-euro suit, nice tan, and disliked him on sight – climbed out and began to lecture the lanky, long-haired boy who climbed sulkily out of the passenger seat. Son, or grandson? Son, Sandro decided; this man was clearly wealthy enough, and smooth enough, to have picked up a woman of childbearing years later in life. He seemed entirely indifferent to any obstruction his wide, low car might represent. Eventually the boy sloped off and, after standing an arrogant, leisurely minute to watch him go, the man climbed back in to the Audi and left.

Impatiently Sandro waited for the big car to move off, half an eye on the tall boy, moving through the crowd. To his mild surprise it was at Carlotta that the lanky boy stopped, Carlotta, in her violet knitted hat, and stooped to greet her. He was casual, but Carlotta’s body language told Sandro that if the kid wasn’t her boyfriend, she wished he was. This was the first time Sandro had seen him, which would imply that he didn’t observe the school timetable very scrupulously. His long hair was smooth and shiny, and he was carrying an ex-army backpack. Carlotta put her hand through his arm; he didn’t object. They went inside.

Sandro waited, leaning against the wall of the school as he had done every day, in case she came back out. There were young people practised in the techniques of truancy; they knew enough not to just go missing, they knew how to sign themselves in then slip away. But there was also this: the street was so lovely in the sharp blue light, so suddenly peaceful now that the students had disappeared inside, that he felt he might stand there all day. So as not to have to think.

The school stood opposite a low stone wall behind which the ground fell away and down into a little valley filled with olive trees and an immaculate villa before rising again to meet his beautiful city’s imposing mediaeval wall, slanting across the hill. It was possibly the most perfect view Sandro had ever seen: the silver-green of the trees, the golden stucco of the villa, the rough grey stone of the city’s fortifications and the distant, stately outline of the great cathedral beyond them. Woodsmoke was drifting up from somewhere on the slopes below, the light was rosy with the early hour, the sky was an almost impossibly clean, clear blue.

Luisa.

It turned out that standing here was not the way to avoid thinking, after all. Sandro stamped his feet in inarticulate frustration, and the sound grated on the quiet air. He should be hand-in-hand with Luisa walking through these narrow lanes and gazing on the city; they should be enjoying their retirement.

Smoothing things over had never been Sandro’s strong point in the marriage – he preferred to sit out a disagreement in silence – but he had tried last night; in fact, he thought he ’d succeeded. Luisa had genuinely thought he was delighted for her; it wasn’t like her to deceive herself but perhaps, on this occasion, she had just heard what she had wanted to hear.

‘Darling,’ she ’d said, tapping the wooden spoon on the side of the pan, replacing the lid, untying the apron, ‘there’s something I need to tell you.’

Six months earlier the words would have raised the hairs on the back of his neck. But that terror had eased; now Sandro had the luxury of a lower-grade anxiety, the nagging, guilty, self-pitying kind that said, what about me?

‘Well, not so much tell you,’ she ’d reconsidered, ‘as ask you.’ Her eyes had danced. And she ’d held his gaze. How was it, he ’d found himself wondering, that after all the poison they put in her system, her skin still had that soft, luminous look? They ’d said something about not going in the sun, about some effect or other the chemo could have, but it couldn’t be just chemical: she ’d looked glorious, transcendent in the steam from her pans.

‘Go on,’ Sandro had found himself smiling into her eyes. How bad could it be? He was worrying over nothing; she had good news of some kind, that much was clear.

‘They’re promoting me,’ she ’d said, a smile twitching at her lips. She ’d tucked a stray hair behind her ear and Sandro had seen that she was wearing a little make-up. ‘Well, sort of, anyway.’

‘Uh-huh,’ Sandro had managed to say. ‘Cara, that’s great.’ Then he ’d considered. ‘But you’re the manageress. How can they promote you when you’re already in charge?’ He was still smiling but he could hear himself sounding querulous, questioning her news. Grudging her the triumph.

‘Ah, well, Frollini – ’ and she ’d flushed, barely perceptibly, ‘he wants me to play more of an active role. In buying, you know.’

Frollini. And there he was again, between them, with his tan, his fine moustache, a beautiful villa not far from where Sandro stood, and a shiny sports car. He ’d always been very good to Luisa; whenever he met Sandro, perhaps a couple of times a year, he would seize Sandro’s hand between his and shake it vigorously. ‘You’re a lucky man, Cellini,’ he ’d say, before clapping him too hard on the shoulder.

On the frosty hillside Sandro made an involuntary, throat-clearing sound of exasperation at the thought of Frollini, at the memory of his own deceitful responses to Luisa last night, and at the pay-off. Served him right.

‘Well,’ he ’d said earnestly, ‘that’s fantastic.’ He didn’t know what idea he ’d had of what buying meant; Luisa looking through slides, or brochures, perhaps, or surfing to websites? Going to the Florentine shows, Pitti Uomo and the like, and picking out whatever took her fancy for the new season; harmless enough.

Well, up to a point, it had turned out.

‘When do you start?’ he ’d said.

‘Well, that’s the thing,’ Luisa had replied. ‘He wants me to start going with him to the shows. Frollini does.’

Sandro had felt his smile turn rigid at the thought of the handsome old man in his cashmere suits, holding his car door open for Luisa to climb in. He had a wife, up in the villa; they ’d been married forever, their children grown up and working abroad. There ’d always been rumours about Frollini and his mistresses, but he was discreet all right. And it came to Sandro that Luisa had always defended her boss against any such charges. ‘He’s not like that,’ she ’d always say. ‘He’s not sleazy like that. No.’

But then you ’d expect her to say that; loyalty was Luisa’s middle name.

‘Right,’ he ’d said, nodding vigorously to cover up the fixity of his expression. ‘Shows. So, when? And where?’ He ’d shrugged, with pretend nonchalance. ‘Milan?’

Next to him on the narrow sunlit street someone emerged through the arched side door to the school: the janitor. Sandro had already introduced himself. He ’d had to; middle-aged man hanging around outside a school. Grudgingly the man had given him the benefit of the doubt; turned out he was an ex-cop himself.

Sandro nodded; the man nodded back.

Last night, Luisa hadn’t been able to look him in the eye. ‘Actually,’ she had said, and the flush deepened, ‘New York. The next shows are in New York.’

Sandro had nodded, dazed, not even asking the next question because the whole edifice he had constructed – the world in which Luisa would return to her old self and they would spend the weekends and evenings together on sedate meals out, picnics and drives in the country – was crashing down around him with such calamitous inevitability that he knew there would be no need to help it on its way. She was going to tell him.

‘Next week,’ she ’d said, looking up from her hands. ‘Flying out Monday morning early. Back Wednesday.’ Her expression had been half defiant, half guilty. ‘Late, Wednesday.’

He ’d been dumbfounded. She was leaving in two days? So it was already arranged. So there was nothing he could do, anyway; feeling anger stir and knot inside him, childishly – ask me? She’s not asking me – Sandro had made a supreme effort.

‘How exciting,’ he ’d said numbly. ‘Mamma mia.’

She ’d leaned across and put her arms around him then, having heard his assent; Sandro could feel her softness against him, could smell her sweet familiar scent mingled with the richer smells of cooking and wanted to rage like a thwarted child. He ’d said no more; he ’d eaten the polpettone, which had smelt so delicious and tasted like nothing but sawdust in his mouth; he ’d washed it down with too much Morellino and become too falsely jovial. He hadn’t slept well.

But this was where they were.

The sun was higher in the sky and the wall was warming despite the fine dusting of frost still visible in the valley below; beside Sandro the janitor was taking advantage of it, standing in satisfied contemplation. His bunch of keys dangling from the gate’s lock, he held a lighter in cupped hands around a cigarette, leaned back and let out the blue smoke with deep fulfilment.

It was 8.30 and Carlotta was inside, at school, where she should be.

The janitor turned to Sandro. ‘So,’ he said, ‘how’s it going?’ He nodded at the open gate, and the keys dangling. ‘The surveillance operation?’

The whole scene was so absurdly peaceful, the sharp blue winter light, the dazzle of white stucco, the picturesque, winding lane and the city spread out below them, that the question for a split second made no sense; for that second Sandro had even forgotten why he was there. Then the faint sardonic edge to the question hit him.

‘I saw her with a boy this morning,’ he said roughly. He wouldn’t have this man patronize him.

The janitor took a small circular tin out of his pocket, opened the lid and stubbed out his cigarette in it before shutting it up again with the butt inside. ‘Otherwise I only have to clean it up myself,’ he explained. ‘Tall, skinny boy? Long hair?’

‘That’s the one,’ said Sandro. ‘Is he bad news?’

‘Alberto? Depends how you look at it.’ Tight-lipped. ‘I wouldn’t want my daughter going out with him.’ Then he seemed to take pity on Sandro. ‘Though her parents might not object to him.’ His tone was sarcastic; Sandro looked at him blankly.

‘Very rich,’ said the janitor patiently. ‘One of the old families, but they’ve consolidated; they own half the warehousing in Prato. They’ve got a castle somewhere in the country, keep a yacht in Porto Ercole, mother spends half the year in India somewhere. Goa? She’s there now.’