A Time of Mourning E-Book

Christobel Kent

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

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2010

Beschreibung

A Time of Mourning introduces Sandro Cellini, ex-cop and private detective: Florence's answer to Donna Leon's Guido Brunetti When a young English girl goes missing from among Florence's hard-drinking, high-living community of foreign art students, ex-policeman, good husband and newly-minted private detective Sandro Cellini is at first unwilling to see any connection with his investigation of the suicide of an elderly Jewish architect. But as he investigates the circumstances of Claudio Gentileschi's death more closely, the connections between the cases multiply, and Sandro's first case turns out to be darker and more complex than he could have imagined...

Leseprobe

A Time of Mourning

Christobel Kent is the author of five novels: A Fine and Private Place, A Party in San Niccolo, 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 trade paperback in 2009 by Atlantic Books, an imprint of Grove Atlantic Ltd.

This paperback edition published by Atlantic Books in 2010.

Copyright © Christobel Kent, 2009

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 Act 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: 978-1-848-87752-8

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 Time of Mourning

Copyright

Author’s Note

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

Chapter Twenty-Seven

Chapter Twenty-Eight

Chapter Twenty-Nine

Chapter Thirty

Chapter Thirty-One

A Fine and Private Place

Chapter One

Acknowledgements

For Donald

Author’s Note

I have tried in A Time of Mourning to be true to the geography of Florence. However, although when I first visited the Kaffeehaus in the Boboli gardens, it was open for customers and entirely possible to sit on its terrace overlooking the city, it has been in restoration for six years and is at present not operating as a café.

Chapter One

IT TOOK FOUR DAYS for the knock at the door. Four long, quiet days in the fading light of an unseasonably mild November, and plenty of time for Sandro to decide whether he liked the two rooms Luisa had found for him to use as an office, if not to make up his mind about what he was doing there in the first place.

It had not occurred to Sandro that he’d be in at the deep end with the first job. He thought he might get eased in gently but, then again, the world doesn’t work like that. It was a lesson he should have learned long ago, that life doesn’t owe you a warning.

The rooms Luisa had found were on the second floor, square and light and plain in a peaceful street off the Piazza Tasso in San Frediano. The street was the Via del Leone, with a small glassed-in shrine to the Madonna on the corner and at least four candles burning, the sign of a God-fearing neighbourhood, or a superstitious one, depending on how you looked at it. Sandro Cellini stood somewhere between the two, born Catholic, naturally enough, but a rationalist by thirty years of police training. He was too ambivalent as a result to go to Mass more than a couple of times a year, Easter and baptisms, but he liked the shrine, anyhow. And where there was God, there were old ladies. When he had been in the police force – a phrase that still knocked him back – Sandro had found pious elderly women always ready to provide detailed testimony as well as to light candles for divine intervention.

The buildings of the Via del Leone were humble, no more than three storeys, and as a consequence the street itself was sunnier, quieter than his home turf, the acoustics less grating on the ear when the first of the morning motorini whined down it on their way to the centre. Born and bred north of the river in Santa Croce among noisy, narrow streets the sun never found, as he stood at the window that looked into the street on his first day, Sandro didn’t know if he’d ever get used to it.

It was Florence, undeniably it was, but it wasn’t the city he’d woken up in every morning for fifty-eight years, where only a shard of blue sky was visible and the street outside vibrated with din from seven in the morning. A cacophonous opera made up of the crash of bins being emptied, the squeak of the buses’ air brakes, the rumble of taxis, the first tourist group of the morning stopping on the corner to be informed loudly in Spanish or German or Japanese of where Dante had been born and Galileo buried.

Looking down, Sandro saw that it might be quiet, but it wasn’t deserted after all. He watched as an old woman led her small, overcoated dog to the kerb so it could crap on someone’s front tyre; soon enough, he thought, he’d know whose car that was and whether he cared or not. She was carrying a bedraggled bunch of chrysanthemums, heading for the cemetery, no doubt. Coming the other way, he saw a pretty girl; a student maybe, with long hair, long legs in dark jeans, stupidly huge studded and tasselled handbag. She was running, in a hurry; almost opposite the house she sidestepped the old lady and her flowers and her dog, and, as if she knew he was up there, the girl tilted her head and was looking back at Sandro. Her eyes slid over him and, ashamed, he ducked away. He wasn’t in this to eyeball passers-by, was he?

Sandro retreated to his desk. It had been found for him, like the flat, like every other piece of furniture from the grey filing cabinet to the elderly but respectable computer, by Luisa. In the silence he reflected that the lack of tourist groups, at least, was a mercy. A fondness for the sound of a Vespa or buses’ brakes might be his own private perversion, but he’d never learned to love the guided tours. Luisa had pointed out that he’d better start learning to love the tourists, because they might turn out to be his bread and butter, just like they were hers.

‘I’m going to start tomorrow,’ he’d announced when she got home from the shop the previous night. It hadn’t gone down well.

‘Ognissanti?’ Luisa said with flat dismay. ‘Really?’ She stood in the kitchen with her coat still on, smelling of woodsmoke from the street.

Ognissanti was All Saints’ Day, the first of November, followed by All Souls’ the day after. Two days when all the leaves fall at once, and flowers are laid on the graves of loved ones. Tradition was, Ognissanti should be a day for quiet reflection, and the consideration of mortality.

‘Why not?’ Sandro said, defensively. ‘They called this afternoon to say the phone line’s been installed. I’ve had enough of hanging around.’

But he knew why not. Religion, habit, duty to the dead, not to mention that it might be obscurely inauspicious to start halfway through a week. And although Luisa was no more religious than he was, the tug of familial duty was stronger; her mother more recently dead. She had to get up early to take flowers to her mother’s grave out in Scandicci, before heading in to the city.

‘You’ll be at work yourself, after all,’ Sandro said.

Like many other religious days, the feast’s status as a public holiday was being eroded, particularly in the big cities with their wealthy, godless visitors, and Luisa’s employer, Frollini, had given in years back. They did good business in November, with the stock room crammed to overflowing and the windows full of sheepskins and velvet and party dresses. Luisa didn’t like it, but it was the new Italy.

‘It seems like bad luck,’ she said uneasily.

‘I don’t want to put it off any longer,’ said Sandro with finality, and she could see that that, at least, was true.

Grumbling, she had got up even earlier than usual to cook for him.

‘Your first day, you’ll take something hot to eat,’ she said, when he wandered into the kitchen, bleary-eyed, to remonstrate with her. The pristine lilies she had bought the night before for her mother stood in the sink.

She’d given him baccalà – salt cod stewed with tomatoes – and when Sandro prised open the foil dish six hours later at his new desk it was still just warm; but then again, it was barely midday. He had been on the job three hours, and had done nothing but ogle a girl through the window and open a file on the computer for his accounts, before closing it again. Expenses to date, five thousand euro, give or take. Income, zero.

Sandro devoured the rich salty stew in five mouthfuls, suddenly starving. He spilled a little of the sauce on his desktop and although he rubbed at it immediately, cursing, it left a tiny orange stain. A good start, he thought to himself. What will the clients think, supposing any ever materialize? He felt ready to hurl something at the wall; what a slob. That night he told Luisa he’d maybe experiment with the local bar for lunch; she eyed him warily.

‘Gone off my cooking?’ He shook his head. ‘As if,’ he said. ‘Just – well. I need to get to know the neighbourhood.’ She nodded, deciding not to be offended. He didn’t tell her the baccala incident had made him feel like a small boy on the first day at school, on a knife edge of misery.

‘How was the visit?’ he said. ‘The cemetery?’

She was pale; he remembered she had been up since six, and he cursed himself for letting her work so hard. He could have just said, I’ll start tomorrow, couldn’t he?

‘Fine,’ she said. ‘It was good.’ She smiled and he could see that for all her pallor and weariness, it had made her happy. For Luisa a visit to the cemetery always kindled something; she still spoke to her mother, standing at the grave, once she had spent twenty minutes arranging the lilies. It was another example of her mysterious superiority, that Luisa was not afraid of grief.

Sandro had been nineteen when his mother died – she had had cancer, though Sandro never knew where – and just coming to the end of his military service. He came back for the funeral in his uniform, unable to cry. His father went to his own grave a year later; they had been hard-working country people with no time for the expression of emotion, and although he’d been no more than sixty the loss had simply been too much for him to bear. Sandro had found himself stunned into silence by their abrupt absence.

It was suddenly too late to ask them anything; within six months he had met Luisa, and asked her to marry him. At the time it had seemed like the only way to survive; within five years he realized that he couldn’t remember his father’s face without taking up the framed photograph he kept in a drawer, and staring hard at it. They were in his head somewhere, the pair of them hand in hand in old-fashioned clothes, but he did not want to think about them; he didn’t have Luisa’s trick of taking sadness by the hand and making it a friend.

‘I’m a very lucky man,’ he said to her back as she stirred something on the stove. ‘Very lucky.’

One of the things Sandro turned over in his mind as he sat there on day two – All Souls’, a little cloudier than day one, the November light a little thinner and paler – was this alteration in his relationship with Luisa. Thirty years married – or was it thirty-one? – and suddenly Luisa was in charge. While he’d been in the force they’d run along separate tracks, two blindsided locomotives, each oblivious to the other’s direction. With pain he thought of the big police station out at Porta al Prato on the busy viale. Standing guard at the north-western approach to the city, the warm, busy corridors, the long, shuttered windows, the camaraderie. Misguided nostalgia, he reminded himself; where was the camaraderie now?

That was unfair, clearly it was. He still saw his old comrades now and again in the city; they’d nod and exchange a word in the street; he thought they’d stand him a coffee if he ever found himself back in the bar on the viale they used to frequent. But what conversation would they have? ‘Sorry, mate’? The murky old Caffe Tramvai – there’d been trams running past the Porta al Prato once, before Sandro was born – with its Formica tables and sixties décor, and the best trippaallafiorentina in the city. He thought of those lunch-breaks now and again, when his guard was down; they would all crowd in there at twelve-thirty and stand eating the ragout out of little bowls, steaming, sweet, garlic and tomatoes and tender fragments of meat. But that friendly shared coffee was never going to happen, was it? Sandro had avoided the place like the plague since the day of his departure on a cold, dark January day nearly two years ago.

Sandro was no longer a police officer. At least, he considered gloomily, he had not been discharged, dishonourably or otherwise; at least he had been allowed early retirement. It had been more than a face-saver; it had meant he could work, because the opportunities for a disgraced policeman were limited. If there’d been any sympathy for his offence among his colleagues, Sandro didn’t seek it out; he didn’t want to be forgiven. The offence of relaying confidential information to the father of an abducted child.

The child’s disappearance had come at a bad time; if you believed in astrology, at some disastrous conjunction of planets, it had always been inevitable that further tragedy could only follow from it. It had been a long time ago, with Luisa the wrong side of forty, and the possibility that they would never have children of their own was turning to stone-dead certainty for both of them. The girl – nine years old – had disappeared from a crowded pool, her body found at a bend in a river in the Apennines a week later, caught in reeds.

No arrest had been made, though they’d had their suspect all right, and Sandro had kept in touch with the child’s father. Why? It was obvious why, people sometimes said to him, it was the human impulse, it was out of sympathy, but Sandro had offered no excuses at the disciplinary hearing; he had remained silent when they were asked of him. He had merely admitted that he had, yes, kept the bereaved, the now childless father, informed; had supplied him eventually with the name and whereabouts of the chief suspect in his daughter’s murder, with every scrap of information. And when, fifteen years later, the suspect – against whom no charges had ever been brought – was found murdered, the whole thing unravelled. Sandro had known immediately that he was responsible for the paedophile’s death, whoever had in fact held the knife against his throat.

The dead man had been guilty, they knew that now, but it had still been wrong. One little breach in the rule of law and the whole thing comes apart at frightening speed; the murderer is murdered, and one of his victims ends up with blood on her own hands. And once you have lied to a man who trusts you, to your partner of more than a decade, you cannot be sure he will ever trust you again.

And that was how Sandro came to find himself adrift. But thirty years in the police leave their mark; it was too late for him to become anything else.

Pietro was still a friend, of course, his partner of thirteen years and as close to a marriage as you can get. Pietro still called at the apartment every other Thursday, religiously, to haul Sandro out for a drink, to talk about football and Fiorentina’s death plunge down through the divisions, a grumble about the new commissario seconded from Turin, nothing too close to the bone. They didn’t talk about Sandro’s disgrace, and though Sandro felt the warmth of Pietro’s sympathy he shied away from voicing his gratitude; it wasn’t the relationship he wanted.

Thirteen years in the same grubby fug of their allotted police vehicle, you get to know the smell of another man’s socks, his aftershave, what he eats for breakfast. How he takes his coffee. Caffè alto, for Pietro, down in one then another on its tail, to kickstart the day; there are some questions that don’t need asking, after thirteen years. Sometimes now, taking his coffee alone, Sandro had to close his eyes so as not to wish it all back again.

Perhaps Luisa had always been in charge. Sitting in the thin sunlight, eyes closed, Sandro felt curiously comforted as he mused on that possibility. Those long years of quiet unhappiness together during which each had shouldered his own burden – the lack of children, the ugliness of daily police work, the shrinking of expectations – Luisa had been in charge all along. Biding her time for the moment when her superior skills would be called for.

Over those four days in the Via del Leone he did come to the conclusion that Luisa knew what she was doing, all right. He’d come with her to see the place, and he hadn’t seen its potential; if truth be told, he’d been downcast by it. Luisa had found out, through the usual mysterious means, that it was about to come on the market, a second-floor walk-up, two rooms and a tiny kitchen inhabited by an exhausted-looking elderly couple and their disabled daughter, who were about to be rehoused in ‘more suitable’ accommodation. That should have given him the hint; public housing was hard to come by, and the comune didn’t step in lightly. The disabled daughter turned out to be middle-aged, brain-damaged and quadriplegic since birth, parked in a tiny kitchen in a wheelchair. The apartment had no bathroom, a fact that did not dawn on Sandro until they left.

‘My God,’ he’d said in the street below, thinking of all those years carrying their helpless child up and down the stairs, while she turned into a middle-aged woman. Luisa had squeezed his hand. ‘It’s a sad place,’ she said. ‘I think that’s why they haven’t been able to find a tenant.’

That and the builder’s yard below the window, currently full of orange plastic tubing, maybe. But there was a sliver of a view of the back of Santa Maria dell’Carmine, if you were disposed to concentrate on that instead, on the frescoes inside that Sandro hadn’t seen since he was a boy, the Adam and Eve, Eve with her hand up to her mouth. These things all settled in his mind in those idle hours. He wondered where they were now, that couple and their ageing daughter, and whether they missed their view. Nonsense, Luisa would say briskly. Modern bathroom, ground-floor access, lifts and bars and all sorts after forty years hauling the grown child up two flights of stairs? Nonsense. It’ll make a good office, and they’re better off where they are.

Day two, just before lunch, Sandro found himself looking down into the street again; he saw the woman with her dog, and realized he was watching for the girl. Out of police habit, getting the lie of the land, or because she’d been pretty? He turned tail, unable to give himself the benefit of the doubt. She had been pretty.

Safely at the back of the building Sandro had spread his copy of La Nazione out on his desk and went through it as though that was his job, reading every story in the paper. He stared at the big stories first, national news. Garbage collection in Naples, dioxins leaching into the food chain from toxic waste. A new book out on the Camorra, and a piece about Calabrian gangsters buying up property in Tuscany. His stomach felt sour and leaden; my country, he thought, staring at the page; there’d been a time when it had been his business. Out at Porta al Prato, buckling on his holster, slapping the peaked cap on his head, jostling out through the door with Pietro, they’d laughed bitterly at their dismal clean-up rate, at all the shit still out there waiting for them, but it hadn’t felt like this.

He worked his way down to local stuff: illegals employed on building the extension to the Uffizi; a hit and run on the viale, involving a child. A doctor found to be a member of a satanic cult drowned in Lake Trasimeno. Sandro worked his way right through to the end before he closed the paper, impotent.

In the afternoon Sandro went out into the street, so as to have something to tell Luisa when he got home. The food in the nearest bar was lousy; a stale roll and some dried-up ham, and the floor was dirty. It had turned chilly, too; after a brisk turn down to the Piazza Tasso and back – on the corner seven candles had been lit for the Virgin this afternoon; Sandro resolved to keep a proper eye out one day for the devout, his future informers – he hurried back to the flat, where the ancient radiators were clanking loudly to keep pace with the cold.

Climbing the draughty stairs Sandro had tried to imagine the place in July, when San Frediano, built for the street sweepers and humbler artisans, the carpenters and stonemasons, had the reputation for being a sun-bleached desert, without high stone facades and deep eaves to protect its inhabitants from the heat of the sun. Did people need private detectives in July?

And, as Sandro found himself reminded once again that that was what he was now, a private detective, he had to fight the urge to put his face in his hands, and groan.

Chapter Two

THERE WERE HOARDINGS ALONG the motorway out by the airport, advertising the agencies. A picture of a young man in a peaked cap, toting a holster, or a Pinkerton’s-style badge. A Discreet and Thorough Service, Any Investigation Undertaken. Financial, Personal, Professional. Experts in Surveillance. They had laughed at them, when Sandro was in the force, though the laughter had been uneasy. Some private detectives were borderline criminals themselves, and smart with it; some of them were close to conmen, some were lazy, some were stupid. But it was others – the laureati with their degrees in IT and control engineering: modern, computer-literate, hardworking – that inspired the unease, a kind of envy, in those embedded in the creaking old machinery of the state police.

Where was the room for someone like Sandro, a village idiot where computers were concerned, old school, a one-man band, among this lot? It was a shark tank, a snakepit. It had, of course, been Luisa’s idea.

‘You’re brilliant at your job,’ she said, to his silence. ‘You’ve got the basics on computers.’ True enough; he might be old school, but even the Polizia Statale had been computerized. ‘You speak a bit of English.’ Sandro grunted at this. His English had hardly been honed to perfection during twenty years of taking down notes from tourists on their stolen purses, struggling to interpret a dozen different accents, Louisiana, Liverpool, London. ‘I could help you with that, anyway,’ Luisa said, thoughtfully.

Sandro had made an effort, asking mildly, ‘Do you really think there’s a – what d’you call it, a market? For a one-man operation?’

Head on one side, Luisa said firmly, ‘Yes, I do.’ He waited. ‘Look,’ she said earnestly. ‘The old ladies.’ Them again. ‘The – I don’t know, the grannies, the individuals, I’m not talking about big corporations, caro, though I suppose there’s money in that and I don’t see why…’ But seeing his face at the thought of selling his services in some boardroom somewhere, she changed tack, frowning. ‘Real people, little people, who can’t get anywhere in the system.’ Despite himself, Sandro had nodded at that. There were such people.

She leaned forward, encouraged. ‘And the foreigners. Not maybe tourists, they’re only here a couple of days, a week at most. But the ones who live here, the ones who would like to live here? The expats?’

Sandro’s shoulders dipped again. ‘What would they need a private detective for?’ he said. ‘Don’t be daft.’ And almost immediately regretted it. Luisa was on her feet then, striding round the kitchen table, her little heels clicking on the pavimento. She had just come in from work, still wearing what he thought of as her uniform. Had she been thinking about this all day on the shop floor? She’d barely taken her coat off, she was so fired up.

‘You have no idea, Sandro,’ she said. ‘No idea at all.’ She had raised her voice without thinking; Sandro glanced at the window, open in the September heat, and that seemed to annoy her even more. ‘For example,’ she said, holding up a finger to get his attention, ‘a client came into the shop, a very nice old lady, English, has lived here for years. Fifteen years at least. Her landlord is saying things about her because he wants her out of the flat. He accuses her of subletting her rooms, he is tampering with her heating to freeze her out. He refuses to carry out renovations. She is helpless.’ Shamed, Sandro chewed his lip. Of course, these things happened. But a private detective?

‘Any number of divorce cases, infidelities,’ Luisa went on hurriedly, knowing this would not appeal to Sandro. ‘A couple who were sold a house in the Chianti with six hectares only to discover none of the land belonged to the seller, and it was too late to recover their deposit? Two hundred thousand euro?’ That was the deposit? Sandro’s eyes popped at the figure.

‘Don’t you see?’ she said, taking his hands in hers. ‘They get married, they buy property, they start a business, just like us. They need help more than us, they don’t know the system. You could advertise, in the free papers, the little magazines for foreigners. And for locals, in La Pulce, that kind of thing. You don’t even have to call yourself a private detective, if you don’t want.’

Sandro studied their hands together on the table, Luisa’s pale and puckered with washing, clean, short nails, her plain gold wedding ring. He should have bought her an engagement ring, shouldn’t he? But they had never had the money. He thought about what she had said. A niche, that was what she was talking about, and he had to admit, he didn’t object to the word. And, as Luisa was too kind to say out loud, what else was he going to do?

Taking a deep breath and without knowing if it was true, Sandro said, ‘I don’t mind that. It says what it means, doesn’t it? I don’t mind being a private detective.’

First thing on day three, Giulietta Sarto turned up, like a bad penny, he thought with something like affection. ‘Oi,’ she shouted into the intercom. ‘Only me.’

She was looking better these days, though Giulietta could hardly have looked worse than she had two years ago when, emaciated from living on the streets, she’d stabbed her abuser and so played her part in the story that had ended with Sandro losing his job. She’d been placed in custody, of course, and put through the mill, but they’d got her off on mental health grounds, then Luisa had taken an interest. Giulietta had put on some weight and was living in public housing, Sandro dimly remembered, not far from here. San Frediano, he thought gloomily as he heard her quick footsteps on the stairs, public housing and old ladies. It’s not going to pay for Luisa’s engagement ring.

‘Hi, Giulietta,’ he said warily. ‘What are you up to?’ Standing in the lobby, she didn’t look bad at all, as it happened. She was wearing a dark suit, cheap but it fitted her. Hair thin from malnutrition but brown instead of the rainbow of red and rust and greenish blonde. Wrists still as thin as chicken bones, but fuller in the face.

‘How did I track you down, you mean?’ she said with rough good cheer. She took out a pack of cigarettes, turned it over in her hands, put it away. ‘Have a guess.’

He nodded. Luisa. ‘She think I need keeping an eye on, does she?’

He saw Giulietta survey the room from the doorway without answering, lips pursed. ‘Bit quiet,’ she commented, and he shrugged, helpless.

She eyed him. ‘Don’t need a receptionist yet, then?’ She must have seen the alarm in his eyes because she burst out laughing then, her rusty, smoker’s laugh. ‘Don’t worry, Commissario –’ And when he flinched, she looked apologetic, started again. ‘Don’t worry, Signore Cellini, I’m not offering. I don’t need a job, as it happens.’ She eyed him for signs of surprise and, seeing none, went on proudly, ‘I’m working at the Women’s Centre. On the Piazza Tasso.’

Bit close to home, Sandro thought, guiltily. He wasn’t sure he needed to be worrying about Giulietta Sarto on top of everything else. ‘Sit down,’ he said, pulling out one of the plastic chairs.

‘Two mornings a week and all day Saturday to begin with,’ she said quickly, as if she knew what he was thinking. ‘Only, when I bumped into Luisa at the baker’s she told me you’d got yourself a little office here. Said I could pop my head around the door.’

Sandro relaxed. What else was he doing, anyway?

‘Thanks,’ he said, smiling for the first time. ‘Maybe you could drum up some business for me, down at the Women’s Centre.’

They both laughed reluctantly at that. The Centre provided emergency contraception, advice for battered wives, rape crisis telephone lines. Halfway house for women like Giulietta, not a centesimo to rub between the clientele.

‘You’ll be all right,’ she said, cautiously. Then, becoming more thoughtful, ‘Seriously, though. I will say. If anyone – not, like, liabilities, I can see you can do without that, but anyone serious, decent – wants a bit of help, I’ll recommend you.’ Sandro had been her arresting officer, two years ago. She looked puzzled at the turnabout in their relationship the offer entailed.

Sandro sighed, the irony weighing a little heavier on him than on her. ‘Thanks,’ he said again. There was a silence during which she fiddled with her mobile phone and he wondered if he should offer to buy her a coffee. But before he could say anything she stuffed the phone into her bag and leapt up.

‘Oh, God,’ she said, panicky and apologetic all at once. ‘It’s ten o’clock. I can’t be late, it’s only my third day!’ And she was off, as abruptly as she’d arrived.

Six hours and four coffees later, the desk drawers now stocked with stationery, La Pulce folded and unfolded a dozen times so he could stare uncomfortably at the ad he’d placed last week (‘Ex-officer from the Polizia dello Stato offers thirty years’ investigative experience and discreet and conscientious service. No job too small.’), Sandro wished he’d asked her to come back for a spot of lunch. Found himself feeling envious of her two mornings a week of being needed.

That night, Luisa chattered on about the day at the shop. A marchesa had been caught shoplifting. Seventy if she was a day, she rattled around in a vast, freezing nineteenth-century pile on the hill up towards Fiesole and had given an Uccello to the Uffizi, but the Americans who used to rent her piano nobile for cash in hand must have got cold feet, what with all the terrorism, because she was clearly broke. Broke, but refusing to admit it. She’d swanned through the shop being gracious to all of them then put a handbag under her ancestral fur coat. The alarms had gone off when she’d tried to leave.

‘Are you listening?’ said Luisa. ‘I thought you’d be interested.’

‘Sorry,’ said Sandro. He’d been wondering how long he should sit there in the Via del Leone, before calling it quits. ‘Shoplifting?’ He wondered if she was about to suggest he should look for some work as a store detective, or private security standing by the cashpoints or the jewellers’ shops on the Ponte Vecchio in a toytown uniform. He’d have to hide whenever a real uniform turned up.

She looked at him. ‘You’re not going to give up, are you.’ It wasn’t a question. As it turned out, Sandro nearly missed his first client. He had advertised his hours of business on the plate he’d had made at the door as well as in the small ads, as eight-thirty until twelve, two until seven. On the doorstep at eight twenty-five on day four, Friday, his key in the lock, he thought, to hell with it. Who turns up at eight-thirty? Not in the crime stories, they didn’t, in the gialli of Rex Stout and Raymond Chandler, they turned up around whisky time, beautiful hard-boiled women with long legs. He should have known, after thirty years, that trouble gets people up early in the morning. People lie awake in the early hours, waiting for it to get light. And private detectives often found themselves drinking whisky by ten, even in the gialli.

But, getting slack already, Sandro had put the key back in his pocket and turned away from the door, from the thought of all those hours to kill. He took a step towards the square, where on the way home yesterday he’d noticed a nicer-looking bar than the grubby one on the corner of the Via Santa Monaca. It was a big, bright place with a marble counter frequented by the market stallholders; he could almost see it from where he stood, full of real life. You could stand there and watch the little kids playing on the slides, the mothers with their bags full of vegetables. He’d had enough of his view of half an inch of Santa Maria dell’Carmine and eighty square metres of orange plastic tubing. He’d had enough of silence and solitude; he was going to the bar.

But something made him turn around. An apologetic cough, a small sigh, ten metres behind him, at his own front door. He turned without thinking, and there she was, a copy of yesterday’s La Pulce in her hand.

Chapter Three

IRIS MARCH BURROWED UNDER the duvet and listened. She could hear the drone of morning traffic in the street the other side of the three-foot-thick walls, but the big, dark apartment was as quiet as a tomb, and as cold.

Iris wanted a cup of tea. Her nose was cold; her feet were cold; the apartment was colder than anywhere she’d ever been in her life, and it was a long way across uncarpeted stone to the kitchen. It was colder than school in England, where the windows rattled and the radiators were never more than tepid, and you sat pressed hopelessly against them turning mottled under your uniform without ever getting warm. The apartment was also colder than home, the terrible mildewed glass house built in the only cold, damp, north-facing site in the whole of the Ventoux by an experimental architect Ma had been having an affair with when she’d dropped out to paint – well, mess about – in the South of France, at nineteen, which happened to be exactly Iris’s age.

A pov, they called her at school, in her discreetly hand-me-down uniform. If you hadn’t sent me there, she used to say to Ma, we could have rebuilt the house. Or put in proper central heating. Iris remembered falls of snow that killed olive trees, and hunters going out on New Year’s Day in hard frosts, blasting away with guns on the hillside below them. Then, feeling herself getting all homesick, she forced herself to remember the days and days of rain, too, the water seeping under the cracked concrete floor of the terrible house. He was fairly famous, now, the architect, though Ma’s house was one of his projects that never got photographed for magazines. He had a shock of white hair and a wrecked red face, and he’d made a pass at Iris, once. She turned over in disgust at the memory, pulling the inadequate duvet over her head.

Made a pass, that was one of Ma’s phrases, always delivered gaily, fondly. ‘Oh, lovey, David Bailey? Twenty years older than me and made a pass before he even knew my name.’ There would have been very little point in blowing the whistle on the architect, even if he had been something like forty-five years older than Iris.

Ronnie’s mother had found the flat. Ronnie was short for Veronica. Being called Iris was bad enough, but she couldn’t imagine how anyone could come up with a name like Veronica for a girl born in 1988; Iris supposed that under the circumstances Ronnie was all right. Ronnie’s mother had racing stables outside Newmarket and a new boyfriend, and wanted Ronnie, mooching around at home between school and whatever was going to be next, out of the way.

‘Bitch,’ Ronnie had said as they unpacked their bags. ‘Why does it have to be stinking, boring Florence?’

Ronnie throwing silk underwear around, chucking expensive boots on the floor. And why, Iris had thought as she looked at her own favourite dress, dark red rayon with a ruffle that was suddenly looking cheap, do I have to come with you, Ronnie?

They’d been default friends at school, and had exchanged emails since, Iris dutiful, nostalgic even, after coming home to France to do the International Baccalaureate because Ma had run out of money for school fees. Ronnie’s emails had been easy, boastful, condescending; Iris had the idea Ronnie’s mother, Serena, was telling her to write them. Serena had a thing about creative people and, Iris being from a creative family, she wanted Ronnie there for some screwy, snobbish reason to do with that. If you only knew, Iris wanted to say. The life of the artist. Ma illustrating children’s books for a pittance. Selling watercolours of Mont Ventoux in a crappy gallery in Aix, at the rate of one a month.

But of course when it came to it, Ronnie didn’t want Iris to come with her to Florence, not much; it had not been her idea at all. It had been Serena’s, of course, and Ronnie didn’t try very hard to disguise the fact. Iris was going to be the sensible one who’d keep Ronnie out of trouble, and the creative one who encouraged her to keep up the classes. And most of all Iris was the one whose mother was so broke the offer of a course in life-drawing and free accommodation in Florence for three months would be snatched off the table.

‘Do I have to, Ma?’ Iris had said sulkily, then, hearing how graceless she sounded, pleading, ‘I hardly know her, these days.’

‘But it’s in Florence, sweetheart,’ Ma had said, a dreamy, faraway look in her eyes. Iris assumed from the look that passes had been made in Florence, too, and sighed.

Ma’s focus had returned to Iris then. ‘And you’ve got talent,’ she’d said, with a determination that unnerved Iris. Ma didn’t have a determined bone in her body, or so Iris had always thought.

‘Ma,’ Iris had muttered, looking down at her feet. ‘Don’t.’ Because Ma would say that, wouldn’t she? Her only child had to have talent, at something. It was no joking matter. She sighed.

‘Darling,’ Ma had said, and Iris heard the worry in her voice. ‘You’ve got to decide on something. You can’t stay here all your life, working in the bar.’ Why not? Iris had thought stubbornly, still looking at the floor. You did. She heard Ma clear her throat. ‘There’s always London.’

Shocked, Iris had looked up then. By London, she knew, Ma meant Iris’s father; she meant that she’d move heaven and earth to get Iris into Camberwell or Chelsea or Goldsmith’s or any other London art school, and she would live with her father and his new family, in Dulwich. With the baby and the four-year-old and the ten-year-old twins and the second wife she’d never met, and her father. Her father whom she barely knew, who had taken absolutely zero interest in his first, grown child. Not now, not ever.

‘Ma,’ she’d said, alarmed, and it was Ma’s turn to look away. This was serious. Grow up, Iris told herself urgently. What does it matter if we don’t get on? Florence might be stuffy and gloomy, but Italy was Italy, right? Michelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci and coffee and sunshine. Even in November. And three months’ proper grown-up life-drawing. It’d be all right.

What it was, was lonely. Resignedly Iris sat up in bed in the dark, sniffing in the cold air. High-ceilinged, north-facing, the room was full of the outlines of things in the gloom; every morning, it seemed, she still woke up wondering where on earth she was. There was a colossal wardrobe on one wall with something like an eagle carved on top of it, and big dusty curtains hung in heavy swags over the shuttered window. She pulled back the duvet. It was warmer outside than in this place, even in November. She crossed the smooth, icy tiles in bare feet, stubbed her toe on some great huge bit of furniture, an oak chest or uncomfortable armchair. ‘Ow. Bugger, bugger, bugger.’ She sat down on the scratchy stuffed seat, rubbing her toe.

Around her the apartment was still quiet; only the ticking of the ancient heating cranking up – or it could be cranking down, for all Iris knew. It never actually seemed to get warm. Iris stood up, opened the shutters and looked out.

Now that she’d got to know the city a little better, Iris sometimes thought she would have lived anywhere but Piazza d’Azeglio. A vast, gloomy nineteenth-century square just to the north of the centre, it was too grown-up, too big, too ugly, too much of a hike from the drawing school on the other side of the river. The massive buildings flanking the dull square of grass and trees were either owned by banks or, like this one, by ancient families who couldn’t afford to keep them up and let little apartments stuffed with hideous old family furniture to foreigners like Ronnie and Iris. They saw her coming, Iris reflected on Ronnie’s mum; had she even seen the place before she handed over the deposit?

The view out of the back was odd; it wasn’t the Florence she’d imagined. The smallish garden, with bits of statues in it and lots of black ivy, and the synagogue, although she hadn’t known that when they moved in. It looked like something from South Kensington, a green copper dome and mottled beige stonework, Victorian. Iris softened; on a morning like this, with muffled sunlight trying to get through the mist, the view was nice. The roofs, some far-off hills just about visible to the south. Iris pushed open the window on impulse, leaned out on the cold stone of the window ledge. It was warmer outside. There was a smell of smoke and the air was mild.

In the summer, Iris supposed, pulling down the sleeves of her T-shirt, you might be glad of the chill inside, and the dark, and the bath that really was made of stone and therefore instantly cooled the water down to barely lukewarm, but they wouldn’t be here in the summer, would they? For the first time, Iris felt a stab of regret. Or maybe she was just dreading what she’d have to do once this reprieve was over. Somewhere a church bell began to clang and she pulled the window shut. Time to get going.

Before she left Iris looked in at Ronnie’s room, out of duty if nothing else. It was bigger than hers, though that wasn’t strictly Ronnie’s fault. Iris had claimed the smaller one, grumpily assuming the role of paid companion; she had been reading Edith Wharton preparatory to coming – Ma’s idea – and saw a number of quite satisfying similarities between herself and the impoverished heroines in the novels. She was supposed to make herself agreeable, or useful. Iris wasn’t sure if she was good at either.

Ronnie hadn’t seemed even to notice. ‘All right,’ she’d said carelessly. ‘Whatever.’ And actually, Iris reflected now, it was likely that she really didn’t care. Ronnie probably knew how things were going to pan out, that she’d only be spending one night in three here anyway, and the rest coming in at two in the morning, singing to herself, high as a kite on dancing and drinking and flirting. And maybe it was because she’d never been short of money, but one thing Ronnie wasn’t, was mean.

The room was dark and fusty and empty; clothes everywhere. The shutters were almost closed, but not quite; Ronnie never did anything thoroughly. The bed was unmade, the laptop left on, a box of Tampax spilling its contents on the bedside table and two pairs of knickers on the floor. Iris went over to the small table – inlaid, rickety, like everything in the flat it was more decorative than useful – and stared at the screen; Ronnie’s MySpace page. A picture of her upside down, her dark brown hair with the blonde streak across her face, and a dozen friends’ pictures up; her MySpace name was Da-doo-ron-ron.

Guiltily, Iris scrolled down to check out the messages people had posted. There was a lot of cheerfully insulting stuff from people back home, saw ya last night, what are you like, love and kisses, loserrr. Florence is Grrr8, Ronnie’d posted on Monday night, and she’d pasted in a Leonardo drawing; she’s changed her tune, thought Iris. A couple of weeks ago she’d have mimed a big fat yawn at the mention of Leonardo’s name.

Knowing she shouldn’t be doing this, Iris minimised the page, flicked to the mailbox, surfed up and down Ronnie’s messages; there was a man, she bet there was, Ronnie’d never head off just to hang out with friends of the awful Serena, even if they did have a castle.

But if there was a man, he wasn’t emailing her. Iris read a couple, cool, non-committal messages to her mum, stuff to Antonella Scarpa at the school about the course, paying her bill for supplies, thank you for the extra lesson to the course director. So formal, so unlike Ronnie: It was very kind of you, I am most grateful. Maybe she was growing up. Nothing about any man, nothing about this trip to Chianti; you’d have thought she’d be boasting all over MySpace.

Iris didn’t do MySpace; it made her nervous, like being back at school, all that bitching and bullying and those snide remarks, but Ronnie loved it. Ronnie’d never been got at in her life, she didn’t have anything to be afraid of.

In fact, Iris didn’t have a computer of her own; wasn’t that weird, everyone said, like she was an Amish or something. Which was stupid; she knew how to use one. But Ma didn’t like them; there’d been computers at school and when Iris came back to do the IB she’d bought her a big old desktop, secondhand from Emmaus the other side of Marseille, but that was her limit. She didn’t have the cash and, anyway, computers were a distraction. ‘Not every day you get to go to Florence,’ Ma had said wistfully when Iris asked about a laptop to keep in touch. ‘Do you want to spend it all in front of a computer?’

Iris bent down and picked up the little carnival mask off the rug, a cheeky little black satin eyemask, no warty old rubber witch job for Ronnie. Halloween seemed a long time ago; Iris remembered the flat full of people as if it was something she’d seen in a film. She’d worn a red feather mask, and her dress with the ruffle. She remembered a couple collapsed on top of each other on the hard sofa, and the old lady – the landlady – bashing with a broom handle on her ceiling below, telling them to be quiet. A drunk American boy asking Ronnie loudly who the fat girl was. ‘Who’s the fat chick?’ Meaning Iris.

The huge studded front door clanged shut behind Iris and she struggled through the iron gate to the street. Sometimes it felt like a great big 200-year-old prison, the keys she needed just to get out of the place practically filled her bag, never mind her sketchbooks and pencils and apron. Outside the square was cold and grey and quiet, the tall, bare trees motionless in the mist.

After a week or so of trying – and failing – to work out bus routes, they’d settled on walking. Iris liked walking, Ronnie didn’t; she grumbled all the way, when she was there at all, not refusing to come out from under the duvet, not rolling in at dawn and climbing into bed just when Iris was climbing out. Still, Iris preferred it when Ronnie was there, because they talked a bit about stuff, because Ronnie was nicer for being a bit subdued, and because when Iris got in to school on her own, she always had to spend the first half an hour making Ronnie’s excuses for her.

She might have said, thought Iris. Given me an idea when she was going to come back.