A Darkness Descending Read online




  A DARKNESS DESCENDING

  A Mystery in Florence

  CHRISTOBEL KENT

  PEGASUS CRIME

  NEW YORK LONDON

  For Rowan

  Contents

  Acknowledgements

  Prologue

  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

  Acknowledgements

  I would like to acknowledge the great debt I owe Angus MacKinnon, without whose clever, careful eye and impeccable instincts Sandro Cellini would never have become the man he is.

  Prologue

  SHE HAD TO LEAN right down into the cot to set him down. It was a movement she had almost perfected over these first six weeks of his life: it might as well have been a decade, because now it seemed to her that the time before him had receded, impossibly out of reach.

  The movement had to be slow and steady, then the arm had to be eased out from under that surprising weight that was his warm, damp head. The soft light glowed from the shelf above the cot: she straightened, set her hands on the rail and looked down. One small, plump arm in the white terry-cloth sleeve was raised and folded against his body like that of a little praying mantis; his cheek was just flushed from the feed, his mouth slightly open. His rosebud mouth with its milk blister: he was perfect. Born perfect, in spite of it all.

  Next door she heard Niccolò shift in his chair, heard the rustle of the newspaper, and held her breath. She heard him cross his legs. She didn’t need to see, to know. They had been one soul, one unit, since they were nineteen years old. She knew what he was thinking. She didn’t move: she was waiting to be sure that the child was asleep, he knew that. She felt as though she would like to stay in here for ever, buried in the warm half-dark, postponing the moment.

  It was not quiet: the Piazza Santo Spirito was almost never quiet, and September was a busy month. She could hear the restaurant sounds, the clink and clatter, the hum of conversation in different languages, a waitress bellowing into the kitchen. The midwife had reassured her, He’ll be used to it. They learn in the womb: these sounds are life to him, they’re his world, like your heartbeat. Some babies had Mozart played to them; her child would have the singing drunks of the Piazza Santo Spirito.

  It was early still. The raucous sounds of the later evening had yet to begin. She liked to put him down by seven, although her mother-in-law found fault with her schedule, as with almost everything else. With the fact that they lived on the Piazza Santo Spirito, where drugs were dealt on the corner and there was always one alcoholic rough sleeper or another fighting, reeling under the statue or parked in a heap of rags and carrier bags against the fountain. The fact that they had never married, that they wouldn’t have the child baptized. Niccolò’s mother even found fault with her age. You make yourself ridiculous. Babies should come at nineteen, twenty. Her mother-in-law’s own age when she had had Niccolò, her only child, her treasure, which meant that she was a young grandmother. She could go on for years yet.

  ‘You put him down at seven, you can’t complain when he wakes you at three.’

  She didn’t complain, though. If she had a complaint, she would not bring it to her mother-in-law. She stood on, still looking down: from next door a tiny exhalation of breath that meant, what are you doing in there still? Not that he would ever voice it. Niccolò did not seek confrontation, he took an age to rise to provocation, which was just as well, given the path he had chosen. Stern, just, certain: his face lifted before her, questioning, and lowered again to resume his examination of the newspaper. As if in confirmation, there was the sound of a page turning, carefully.

  It came to her that the child didn’t need her, not really: milk came in bottles too, after all. She was not strictly necessary, not with the steady presence of Niccolò, his certainty, his resolution. His goodness.

  In the kitchen the pots stood ready. She had made a sauce with aubergine and tomato. She need only turn and step back out of the warm, hushed gloom and light the flame, lay the table. Sit, push the food around the plate while Niccolò averted his eyes. She hadn’t eaten, it seemed, in months, but Niccolò said nothing.

  Leaning down, gently, slowly, she pulled the white blanket over her son, to the chin. Up she came again, out of the cot, out of the child’s orbit, his sweet breath, his innocent, milky flesh, set her hands back on the rail to keep them still.

  And it began: she was powerless to stop it. She tried to delay it, as if she might fool her own body; she stood very still, breathed as slow as she could. It’s in your head, she told herself, it’s your head that got you into this. Don’t do it, don’t look. Outside the night was cooling, the blessing of September after August, but a sweat broke on her upper lip. Don’t do it to yourself. She reached up to the shelf where the nightlight sat, felt along it with her hand, stopped, lifted it. Looked. No.

  The sweat bathed her, from her brow to the backs of her knees. She felt the most sudden terrible urge to run to the window so quickly she wouldn’t be able to think and the momentum would propel her through, through the shutters, across the too-low sill and down three floors, twenty metres, she would fall, shocking in her house slippers and nightwear, between the restaurant tables. And there would be a silence. The silence was what she wanted: she wanted it all to stop.

  Moving the hand along further, she reached for the baby monitor. She pressed the switch and its blinking green light came on. She turned for the door.

  Niccolò’s face raised to hers, taking in the flush on her cheeks, the sweat on her neck, the dress sticking to her too-thin body, to the hips that had once been rounded, the breast that had been full. She felt a hundred years old under his gaze, a shrunken thing.

  You make yourself ridiculous, at your age.

  He could see the tremor in her hand as she pushed the door behind her because she saw it reflected in his face, but he said nothing.

  ‘He’s down,’ she said.

  Chapter One

  SHE CAME IN PAST the journalist, a big man taking notes, handsome if you liked that kind of thing. Giuli didn’t. She’d seen him before; he smelled of cigarettes and good aftershave.

  The meeting room was stuffy and crowded. Giuli – Giulietta Sarto, trainee private investigator, clinic receptionist and dogsbody, it sometimes seemed to her, to one and all – staggered a little as still more people jostled in. Among them she glimpsed a familiar face: Chiara, looking around for someone. They were already standing. The few chairs had been first ignored and then shoved aside.

  On tiptoe Giuli strained to find Chiara again, to see if she was alone or if, like Giuli, she was with someone. Daughter of a policeman, fresh-faced, eager, nineteen years old: what was she doing here? Just the kind of new recruit they needed, actually. But she didn’t reappear. Perhaps, Guili thought, I was mistaken.

  A window would have been a blessing; the evening air had been soft and just warm as she and her boyfriend
Enzo had walked here, hand in hand. Instead, the overhead strip lighting and absence of any natural light were combining to give Giuli a headache. She didn’t suffer from claustrophobia, and she was resolutely disinclined to panic in any given situation, which was one reason why Sandro – Sandro Cellini, policeman turned private investigator and, as it happened, old friend and former colleague in the force of Chiara’s father Pietro – had decided to trust her with more work. Yet as the crowd once again shifted her on her feet, Giuli felt her gut tighten all the same and she groped for Enzo at her side. Looked for emergency exit signs, of which there were none.

  Enzo took her hand firmly in his and she turned her head towards him. His broad, homely face framed by the old-fashioned haircut looked back at her, absolutely reassuring.

  ‘Not your idea of a romantic evening?’ He ducked his head shyly under her gaze, looking at her sideways. She squeezed his hand.

  It was not an attractive venue, but then the Frazione Verde – its membership an eclectic, impoverished assortment of intellectuals, ex-communists, fervent greens, peaceniks and all the considerable variety of those, like Enzo and Guili, disillusioned with mainstream politics – couldn’t afford anything better. Access was via a passage that, if the smell was anything to go by, was used as a latrine by the local rough sleepers and ran behind a deconsecrated church on the Via Sant’Agostino, a hundred metres from the Piazza Santo Spirito. Constructed as a makeshift dispensary for charity following the war, it was crammed between two other buildings; it might have been above ground, but being inside the place felt like being buried.

  At the back someone began to stamp and holler. Other feet and voices joined in a ragged chant, which then petered out. The strip lighting flickered briefly and Giuli felt a sweat break out on her forehead: she’d worn a jacket, thinking September could be treacherous, and she pulled it off with sudden violence. Enzo lifted a hand to her bared arm, to calm her. ‘It’s fine,’ she mouthed, trying to make her smile reassuring. Was she turning squeamish? Was Giulietta Sarto, ex-offender, ex-addict, dragged up on the Via Senese by a whore, turning bourgeois? Never.

  And it was fine. She believed. She believed in this place, however suffocating and crowded and ugly. She believed in the chants raised behind her. For to her surprise, Guili had found the first time Enzo had brought her to one of these meetings that she believed in protest. This was her voice, the voice she’d been waiting to hear come from her own mouth.

  Heads were turning now, and the sound had changed, a kind of jeering applause, angry and approving at the same time. Movement set up again in the crowd, then almost magically it calmed of its own accord, a hush fell over them, an attentiveness, as though St Francis had come among the beasts.

  Giuli frowned at the comparison that had suggested itself to her despite a godless upbringing, despite the fervently anti-religious stance of the Frazione Verde. But there was something of the saint about him. About the man whose arrival in the meeting room – absolutely punctual as always, the harshly ticking clock over the door showing eight o’clock to the very second – had turned heads and quieted the fray. Craning her neck, across the room Giuli could only see his narrow temples, the hair just turning grey, the deepset, dark eyes behind thick glasses, his head turning this way and that as he made his way towards the stage. Hands from the crowd went out to touch him as he passed.

  Niccolò Rosselli: the Frazione’s leader and figurehead, thrust unwillingly into the limelight, humble, unassuming, but once on that podium a different man. Once on that podium, you believed he could do anything. He would be a deputy, he would take his place in the seat of government, he would battle for them.

  At the front of the crowd now, Rosselli bent his head to climb the three steps to the stage, and at the sight of the vulnerable back of his neck, at the head bowed as if in humility, the narrow shoulders in the dusty jacket, they quieted.

  Another man waited for him, at the edge of the stage. Rosselli moved across the bare scuffed boards – no lectern, no props – he turned, he raised his hands, and they were absolutely silent. Behind the glasses his eyes burned. The planes of his face, it seemed to Giuli, were sharper than before. His voice, when he spoke, was deep and cracked and fierce.

  ‘Do you think it will be easy?’ A murmur, as though he was frightening them, that died away as quickly as it had come.

  ‘It won’t be easy.’ His hands came down, as if in a blessing, and the upturned faces were rapt and still: he spoke to them and silently they gave him back their faith.

  ‘There are forces ranged against us, we know that. You must be ready for a fight, but you must be ready to fight fairly. Because if once we falter in that determination then we are become what we are here to sweep away. Once we take a bribe, once we give preferment, once we dig dirt or pass false information. Instead we pay our fines, we deliver our taxes, we work as hard as we are capable of working and we fight to protect those who need our protection.’

  Giuli held her breath: she couldn’t move her eyes from him but she listened to the room around her, her heart in her mouth.

  He raised his chin, and in the small movement issued a challenge. ‘So we do not falter. We fight without resting. That is our understanding.’

  And, pausing, Rosselli watched, his narrow shoulders very still and only his eyes behind the glasses moved, counting them all in, and they were with him. Every heart in the overheated room was lifted; they rode a magic carpet with him. But there was something else. Giuli felt with a palpable prickle of dread that as he held their attention, while they were all looking his way, something else had crept into the room.

  Niccolò Rosselli held up his hands, palms out. ‘You do this with me,’ he said, ‘and I will bring you your reward.’ And as it began, the response he demanded, the growling of approval that might at this early stage have been mistaken for dissent, it was then that Giuli saw it coming, saw as if in an instant of foresight. Because something happened.

  A hand came out, from the big man beside him, and touched him on the elbow. Was it a warning? Or the anticipation of what was to come? And in response Giuli could not have said what it was in Rosselli – a slip, a faltering, or just a moment’s hesitation – but his whole stance changed, for a fraction of a second, the set of his shoulders, the turn of his head, as if he were bewildered by where he found himself, as if he were at a loss as to what to do next. And she was not the only one to see it: the roar the crowd wanted to deliver shifted like a wind, dying in their throats.

  And then, as if he heard the warning note, because he knew the crowd better than he knew himself, Rosselli stiffened, stood straight. The hand on his elbow drew back. And the voices went up, the noise was suddenly deafening, a stamping and catcalling that must have been heard out in the piazza. Giuli gave in to it, eyes closed in relief for a moment before she opened them again.

  Before them, swaying, on his face that habitual expression of fierce distress, of anguish, partly on behalf of his people, partly personal discomfort at the nakedness of their approbation and the loudness of their praise, Rosselli waited for quiet. And quiet came: they waited in turn. On tiptoe Giuli gazed at his face, willing him to speak, unable to breathe because she knew that the something wrong that she had seen, was still wrong. Behind the glasses his eyes looked to one side then another; his mouth moved, but no sound came out.

  And then he fell.

  Chapter Two

  AT HIS KITCHEN TABLE, Sandro Cellini pushed the, newspaper aside with a sound of exasperation. There was a fuzzy photograph on the front page of people grouped beside a swimming pool; inset was a studio glamour shot of a seventeen-year-old girl – a dancer was what they called her. The story was about a man who allegedly arranged for women to entertain their prime minister, some of them under-age, all of them described as ‘beautiful’. He glanced over at his wife. Not a prude, nor a man of the world either, married thirty-five years and faithful – though there’d been moments of temptation, more than one – Sandro would have found it dif
ficult to describe his response to the news story. ‘Bunga bunga’ was how the sex was described.

  Unease, Sandro supposed, would be his predominant emotion, if emotion it was, closely followed by weary despondency: it went deep, this stuff. When the lawyers went after the head of state, ranks closed. The last time they’d spoken, even Pietro, Sandro’s old partner in the Polizia di Stato, had been tight-lipped on the subject. ‘He’s not the only one,’ had been all he would say. ‘There are ramifications.’

  Something was happening, over his head, behind his back, in the force where once Sandro had been a brother-in-arms. Now he was exiled and it seemed that there really were no-go areas. Could he no longer talk politics with his old friend? He folded the newspaper so he could not see the photograph or the headline – ‘NEW ALLEGATIONS! LARIO SPEAKS!’ – then pulled the paperwork on his latest job towards him.

  Gloomily Sandro stared at the typed page, details of a traffic accident from a medium-sized local insurance brokers. An ex-colleague had given them his name, a man neither he nor Pietro had ever had any time for, a not-very-bright police commissario who’d told Sandro about the recommendation with a gleam in his eye that said, You owe me one. So this was what Sandro had to look forward to as his main source of income; it seemed to him as he stared at the page to be all of a piece with the newspaper reports of men in high office booking prostitutes. There was something profoundly depressing about spying on claimants faking injury in car accidents: the insight into his fellow man, his brother Italian, the unease at representing the big company against the little guy. Even if the little guy was, in plain language, fraudulent.

  It was eight in the morning, the sky was blue and the September air fresh through the open window; the gust of it that had come in with his wife Luisa from her dash to the market smelled of fallen leaves. She’d set a bag of bread and a butcher’s packet of something, stained pink, on the table. A small box of mushrooms, the yellow trumpet-shaped ones, with shreds of moss still clinging to them, and a plastic carton of green figs, the last of them, oozing sweeter than honey.