The Viper Read online

  The Viper

  Christobel Kent was born in London in 1962 and grew up in London and Essex, including a stint on the Essex coast on a Thames barge with three siblings and four step-siblings, before reading English at Cambridge. She has worked in publishing and TEFL teaching, and has lived in Modena, in northern Italy and in Florence. She is the author of the Sandro Cellini series and a number of standalone thrillers including The Crooked House, The Loving Husband, The Day She Disappeared and What We Did. She lives in Cambridge with her husband and five children.

  Also by Christobel Kent

  The Sandro Cellini Novels

  The Viper

  The Killing Room

  A Darkness Descending

  The Dead Season

  A Fine and Private Place

  A Time of Mourning

  Other titles

  A Secret Life

  A Florentine Revenge

  Late Season

  The Summer House

  A Party in San Niccolo

  What We Did

  The Day She Disappeared

  The Loving Husband

  The Crooked House

  Published in trade paperback in Great Britain in 2020 by Corvus, an imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd.

  Copyright © Christobel Kent, 2020

  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.

  Every effort has been made to trace or contact all copyright holders. The publishers will be pleased to make good any omissions or rectify any mistakes brought to their attention at the earliest opportunity.

  10987654321

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  Trade paperback ISBN: 978 0 85789 334 5

  E-book ISBN: 978 0 85789 335 2

  Printed in Great Britain

  Corvus

  An imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd

  Ormond House

  26–27 Boswell Street

  London

  WC1N 3JZ

  www.corvus-books.co.uk

  Contents

  The day was cold, early

  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

  Afterword

  To Europe, that made me welcome

  The day was cold, early

  HE WENT IN THROUGH the side gate, more out of long-ago habit than any fear that he would be detained for trespassing after all this time. It had once been painted but now the metal had reverted almost to nature, greenish, mottled and flaking, camouflaged against the late-summer hillside. But it didn’t creak for once; carefully, he latched it behind him with a gloved hand. The sky curving over them was pale, streaked with morning pink. Autumn in the air.

  ‘Via,’ he said, hoarse, throwing his hands out, and Gelsomina ran ahead, panting, nose down, ears flopping in the leaves that carpeted the hill that climbed behind the house. He didn’t believe there were truffles here, but she’d always been a stupid dog. The thought made him laugh, the old joke. And the hound.

  He hurried past the house, averting his eyes, the flaking wall at his shoulder, the sweeping roof-high marks left on the stucco from years, decades earlier, the lines traced, curving and intersecting, by a long-gone hand. He experienced an uneasy shifting of relief when he started the climb and left it behind, although it had been empty for years. There had been rumours perhaps ten years back that more foreigners wanted the place – they’d make something out of it for other foreigners and the odd rich Florentine, a yoga retreat or a health farm – but if the plans had ever been real, they’d fallen through. Even if you didn’t know anything about it, the first sight of it would be enough to send you back to your hire car and down the neglected road to your luxury hotel room: La Vipera – The Viper, named for the snakes that rustled in the dry leaves all around it – sat in a damp wooded cleft with its face turned into the hillside, and after a week of September rains it was dank and slimy.

  He didn’t know why anyone would come up here these days. He shifted, uneasy still. He wouldn’t be here himself, but money was money.

  Truffles were fussy, temperamental organisms, and there was no mystery about their disappearance, fewer each year and then none at all. The clue was in the roar of traffic down there in the valley, winding out across the widening plain from the great red low-lying city; it was in the poisoned air. They had signs now, on certain days, illuminated signs at the entrance to Florence forbidding traffic.

  But the fewer truffles there were, the higher the price.

  Up the hill ahead of him, under the trees, Gelsomina moved between the mossy stones, her rear end wagging with excitement.

  He paused and turned as the dog raised her head and ran on after the scent; he looked back down the hill.

  A mist had drifted in after him. It hung in the dark canopy of the forest and most of the house sat invisible below it now. Only a corner of the red roof jutted out, half caved-in where a storm had knocked a chimney down four, five years earlier. The whole place should have gone then, by rights, but it seemed to hold on, through the rains, a heavy snowfall, blistering summers; doggedly, maliciously it endured. He turned back uphill and whistled for the dog.

  Silence. He walked on, until the roof of a tiny shepherd’s hut appeared. Although the mist had crept higher, it clung, leaving a sheen on the summer-darkened leaves. He could have done this with his eyes closed, never mind the fog; he knew each stone. ‘Mina!’ he bellowed, angry, waiting for the rustle of the returning bitch, his hand out to administer a clout to her stupid old head. When still he heard nothing, he stopped and raised his head, sniffing the air.

  His heart rate didn’t rise, there wasn’t much would cause that at his age, but he felt an adjustment all the same, a shift in chemical composition as his body turned itself, like a sunflower to the sun, towards the threat. He walked on, steadily uphill. She was gone – he knew that before he pushed aside the door that hung from one hinge and saw her lying there on the dirt floor with her teeth bared – but because he had long since consigned emotion to the category of wasted energy, he just stood there in the doorway and waited for what would come next.

  It wasn’t, in the end, what he expected. The last thing he experienced, as he stepped into the hut for a closer look at what sat in the shadows, was surprise, which some would have considered
more than he deserved.

  Chapter One

  La Vipera.

  ‘YOU DO REMEMBER IT, RIGHT?’

  Closing his eyes now and feeling the last warmth of the sun falling through his own kitchen window, it was the smell that Sandro Cellini remembered, incense rising in the rooms where the shutters had been closed against the low evening light. He remembered brushing against something that tinkled as he came inside. Dust motes hanging in the light that slanted through the shutters, and a chill inside the house’s thick walls. He remembered the exact proportions of the big kitchen and the odd sadness he had felt on entering it. A room like his grandparents’ kitchen, a marble slab for working pasta and a huge smoke-blackened chimney breast, only the sight of this one would have made his grandmother weep, the marble loaded with the detritus of a disordered household, beer bottles and spilled food and half a motorcycle engine dismantled in black grease.

  And he remembered the drawings that covered every inch of the kitchen’s crumbling plaster walls and scrawled and looped outside too, on the wall facing into the hillside. Some passing artist, one of them had said. One of the women had told him that and, as he remembered, a face swam into view, small square chin, defiant.

  Five women, one man: he could visualise them, in a kind of arrow formation, and there she was, her, their leader, at the arrow’s head, tall, the long hair, the long slender fingers, the pale eyes. Her lover, the Italian guy, at her left hand, the small one, with her defiant look, at her right.

  ‘I remember it,’ said Sandro, opening his eyes to see his own kitchen, in the present day, and Pietro still in front of him, the mild, cheerful, inquiring face of his ex-partner in the Polizia dello Stato – after the thirty seconds’ reverie that had taken Sandro back nearly forty years – older now than when he’d closed them. ‘I don’t remember the names. Well – except hers. Nielsson.’

  ‘And the place?’ said Pietro. ‘Sant’Anna?’

  Sandro shifted in his chair, uneasy. ‘A miserable little place, really, it was then. A handful of little smallholdings, a bar, the big house up on the hill. A hundred inhabitants?’

  ‘Not even that,’ said Pietro.

  Sandro sighed. ‘It was a long time ago,’ he said. ‘And the investigation was –’ He hesitated. ‘Something and nothing.’

  Sandro had been a rookie back in 1976, when the call had come in. Anonymous: informing on a handful of hippies, some wealthy, some not, some Italian, some not, living in a decaying farmhouse on the edge of the village of Sant’Anna, itself just over the southern hills that ringed Florence. Forty years ago. The caller – almost certainly a resentful local, a slighted tradesman, a farmer used to using the neglected land, it was common enough even now – had accused them of various kinds of immorality, including prostituting minors. Sandro, wet behind the ears, had gone along, his supervising officer that old thug Baratti, long since retired, probably dead. There had been no minors on the premises and no evidence of prostitution. They had been up there three times and found nothing to prosecute, closed the case. Long ago and far away.

  Except. Except. Except now an old countrywoman had stumbled across two bodies in a hut, a hundred metres from the place. La Vipera: The Viper, although no poisonous snakes were in the frame for this one. Unless vipers had learned to stab people to death.

  ‘I couldn’t believe it,’ said Pietro. ‘I mean, it was luck enough that the record of the investigation hadn’t been lost. But when I saw your name on it!’ He was gleeful, delighted. ‘We need you, Sandro. And the boss has agreed to it. You’re on the team. A consultant.’

  Luisa set down the coffee-pot gently and stepped back. It wasn’t like her to stay so silent.

  ‘It’s very kind of you,’ said Sandro, his fingers uncharacteristically nervous on the tabletop, ‘but really, I –’

  ‘Kind?’ exploded Pietro. ‘Didn’t you hear what I said? We need you.’ And he shoved the tablet towards him across the table.

  On the table in front of him in his own kitchen, Pietro’s tablet, its screen split between two windows, showed Sandro the first page of a police report on one side and a couple of columns of La Nazione, complete with photograph, on the other. Sandro made himself focus on the facts.

  The bodies of a man and woman were found yesterday in an outbuilding of the estate of La Vipera, in the riserva statale of Vallombrosa in the province of Florence. The man is believed to be Giancarlo Loutti, 76, butcher, who was last seen on Friday last. The remains of the female have proved more difficult to identify owing to advanced decomposition, but the police laboratory is ‘making progress’. La Vipera attained notoriety in the mid-1970s when it was acquired by Danish heiress Johanna Nielsson and a communal-living experiment was established there (by Ms Nielsson and her lover Marcantonio Gorgone) on the principles of free love and socialism. Ms Nielsson has not been located for comment, although it is believed the property is still legally in her possession. Gorgone’s whereabouts are not known.

  There was a photograph of a hillside where the remains of a rooftop were just visible through trees still in full leaf.

  ‘They haven’t got much,’ said Sandro, staring at the picture, remembering the haze inside that house, the tinkling, and faces, now, faces after all this time. Johanna Nielsson. She had had a long, pale face, grey eyes, unblinking.

  ‘La Nazione?’ said Pietro. ‘The reporters lasted two days in Sant’Anna before they gave up.’ He sighed. ‘I could have told them they wouldn’t get anything out of the locals – they wouldn’t talk to us either.’ Gently he prodded the iPad back towards Sandro. ‘I think we should probably be glad they aren’t going to town on it – yet. Do you want journalists tramping all over that hillside?’

  ‘Who found them, did you say?’ said Sandro, and he felt it begin to stir, the old investigative instinct.

  ‘A lady called Maria Clara Martinelli,’ he said, swiping the screen left.

  Three headshots appeared and instinctively Sandro reached up over his shoulder, and there was Luisa behind him, one hand meeting his, the other coming to rest gently on his shoulder.

  Maria Clara Martinelli was named on the left: Sandro didn’t believe he had ever seen her before. The shot looked like it had been taken in the door to the local bar, where she was standing to attention for the camera. A square un-made-up mannish face that was at odds with a monumental bosom and a too-tight skirt suit, a hank of thick straight hair falling to either side, she was grinning broadly at the photographer. He almost found himself smiling back, like a fool.

  ‘A contadina,’ said Pietro. ‘Widow woman. She has a smallholding just over the ridge and she was looking for a sow that had got loose. Found the beast in this little lean-to just above La Vipera. Attracted by the smell, probably.’ Pietro stood up abruptly. ‘She claimed to be able to identify the female victim. Though there was considerable decomposition.’

  Under Sandro’s eye Pietro took a step or two to the window, still open to the street this damp, warm afternoon. Florence might be a big city but there were farmhouses still under the flyovers and ring roads, and they both had enough experience of the countryside to know pigs would eat anything.

  At the table, Sandro moved his finger across the hard, bright screen. The photograph in the centre of the spread was of another woman, but she might have been a different species, she was so far distant from Maria Clara Martinelli. An old photograph, forty years and more. The way she dressed, the way she stood, the way she wore her hair, all said it. An A-line mini-dress, high at the neck, a hand on her hip, one long slim leg straight and the other extended in front of her in a dancer’s position. Her dark blonde hair was long and unbrushed and parted at the centre, and although she was standing in the rubble of an untidy country farmyard, her feet were bare. She stared out from the frame of her hair, hostile and beautiful. Johanna Nielsson.

  There was a sigh behind Sandro and Luisa was gone, clattering at the stove, unscrewing the coffee-pot. For a fleeting moment, he thought of Luisa back then, wondered h
ow much she remembered of a case that had come up when they had been barely an item still.

  From the window Pietro said, without turning round, ‘I don’t think there’s a man on the team capable of solving anything more complicated than a domestic murder, Sandro.’ He cleared his throat. ‘We need you. No one can get people to talk like you – and you know these people.’

  ‘I did know them,’ said Sandro, but he was lost, and he knew it.

  All very nice. But now he had to actually walk into the police station and get started. He sighed. ‘I’m in,’ he said.

  But, beginning to walk back towards him from the window, Pietro started talking like he hadn’t heard, or like he’d taken Sandro’s agreement for granted all along. ‘They think there’s a good chance it could be her,’ he said. ‘The dead female. They think it could be Nielsson.’

  Chapter Two

  JUST ENOUGH HAD CHANGED at the police headquarters for Sandro to feel comprehensively disoriented. It was rather like dreaming about his childhood home, which he did regularly still, those dreams where nostalgia turns you feeble and longing and then you trip over a strange dog and start awake.

  He remembered the operations room with its view of the back wall of an old cinema, although the graffiti had changed. The long whiteboard tacked with crime scene shots: Sandro averted his eyes. Two long tables, three computer screens, behind each of them a lad: they all scrambled to their feet when Pietro – Commissario Pietro – walked in. He proceeded to introduce them to Sandro while they waited for the new superintendent, who was in a meeting. They consisted of a stocky ginger boy called Parini, another called Panayotis – of Greek origin, very dark – and a whippet of a kid called Ceri, just graduated to agent, with fancy sideburns and whose knee jiggled constantly when he returned to his seat.

  Sandro’s eye was drawn back to the pictures, gliding over them just slowly enough to register that seven were of the crime scene, two mortuary shots.

  Then the door opened and the lads were all on their feet again because the super walked in.