Dead Season Read online

  It was hard to marshal your thoughts in this temperature. Brunello’s wife was after him and Sandro Cellini, private investigator, was after Brunello. Roxana slowed as it dawned on her: this was something. Not just a rumour, not just a bit of something to be gossiped about – this was her boss. Her job. If Brunello was in trouble – then she stopped.

  Even from the end of the street she could see that something was up. The light was on in the bank, but they didn’t open up again till four, didn’t have to get back inside till three-thirty. Could Val have come back early from his lunch hour, instead of his usual six minutes late, smiling amiably and knowing he’d be forgiven?

  But August turned everything on its head; maybe Val had got too lazy to go out in the first place. And for a minute, her thoughts loosened by the wine, Roxana thought again of the man from the cinema with his bag of takings. As they came in with their cash and paying-in books, all those shop assistants and market boys, were they tempted just to do a runner? They must be. August would be the month to do it.

  It wasn’t Valentino. Marisa Goldman met her at the security door.

  Marisa Goldman, straight-nosed, arrogant and beautiful as an Egyptian cat – only not today. She was tanned, her black hair was looped up in the usual tight shiny French knot, but under the superficial effects of the sun she looked sallow and ugly with shock.

  ‘What is it?’ said Roxana immediately. ‘Aren’t you supposed to be on what’s his name’s yacht? What’s happened? Something’s happened.’

  But Marisa was saying nothing; carefully she closed the door behind Roxana and as they passed from the sweltering street into the tepid gloom of the banking floor she felt a sweat breakout all down her back. Only when they were both in Marisa’s neat office, with the leather and steel chairs and the expensive lamp, did she speak.

  ‘It’s Claudio,’ she said, and her voice shook.

  ‘Claudio,’ repeated Roxana stupidly, wanting to ward off the terrible moment. ‘What’s happened?’

  They were both standing. She saw that Marisa was wearing beach clothes, a turquoise silk shirt, no jewellery, sandals. Those little knotted cotton bracelets you could have tied round your wrist by some Chinese girl on the beach.

  ‘She phoned me. Irene Brunello called me …’ She looked at her watch, staring as if her life depended on it. ‘A bit more than an hour ago.’

  ‘You got here quick,’ said Roxana. An hour? From Elba?

  ‘I took the helicopter,’ said Marisa, distractedly.

  ‘She was calling here yesterday,’ said Roxana, hearing the foolish eagerness in her voice. ‘She even called me at home—’ But then she faltered, seeing the look of dull fear on Marisa’s face.

  ‘Yesterday?’ Marisa sounded bewildered. ‘She knew yesterday?’

  ‘Knew what?’

  And then Marisa seemed to crumple, with a small sound of distress, her long angular body collapsing into the uncomfortable leather sling of her office chair.

  ‘She’s been asked to – they need her to identify—’ She stopped, swallowed. ‘He’s dead,’ she said, barely whispering. ‘Claudio’s dead.’

  Roxana stood over her superior, and stared. With one part of her brain all she could think of was that she should take the woman’s hand, rub some colour back into her cheeks, fetch a glass of water – but the rest of her head was suddenly filled to painful bursting with that awful word.

  ‘Dead?’

  And the flood of images, unstoppable, came: Claudio Brunello giving her a quizzical, serious, calculating look over his screen; the fastidious movement with which he adjusted the sleeves of his jacket; the look – impatient, fond, superstitious – he would shoot at the photograph on his shelf. And more than images: his soft, considered, evasive voice, murmuring behind his closed door; the smell of sandalwood and polished leather that entered a room with him.

  Marisa looked up at her and jerked her head in a nod that was more like a spasm.

  Abruptly Roxana sat down. ‘But what—’ And then she stopped. Of course. ‘An accident,’ she said, almost relieved. How could it have been anything else? ‘And she’s been trying to get hold of us. Oh, God. In the car?’ The boss drove that car so fast, it was so unnecessarily powerful, and the coast road—

  Somewhere off beyond the office door there was a noise, the sound of Valentino back from his lunch break, the hiss of the door and his idiotic friendly voice calling out.

  But Marisa was shaking her head. Roxana’s thoughts whirled – a drowning, the currents up there, a body pulled out of the sea – until at last Marisa spoke, with what seemed like a terrible effort.

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘It wasn’t an accident.’

  *

  ‘Anna’s on her way,’ said the tough, skinny Russian girl on reception at the Loggiata.

  She eyed Sandro with deep suspicion, before adjusting it to a look of contempt for Giuli, at his side.

  ‘She’s laying up for tomorrow’s breakfast. She’s a bit slow on her feet these days.’ Sarcastic, with it: Sandro just smiled and nodded. A violent death put things in perspective. Like childbirth, no doubt: the surly Russian was the least of their worries.

  Outside there was the soundtrack of August: cicadas in the garden below them, starting up as the sun went down, and the sullen banging of builders at work, the crash of falling plaster. They might work at half-speed in August, but the city was full of them. The skies were clear, people were away, businesses shut for a month – so they called in the builders. Scaffolding everywhere, skips and rubble, and that infernal banging.

  He turned to Giuli and whispered, ‘Thanks for coming.’

  She looked at him with weary amusement. ‘No problem,’ she said.

  The Loggiata was, as Pietro had said in what now seemed like another world but was only that tired bar in San Ambrogio last night, an old-fashioned sort of place. If old-fashioned meant it hadn’t been redecorated in thirty-five years and smelled of decades of cat. The hotel occupied the top floor of a crumbling palazzo behind Santo Spirito, and the foyer opened through a long, glazed door on to the loggia that gave it its name. The veneer reception desk was surmounted by a frayed square of orange hessian and the upholstered chairs in which he and Giuli sat were shiny with age. But the foyer was vast, the polished cotto of the floor undulating and ancient and the tall windows were original, with delicate glazing bars and wobbly old glass.

  Outside the light was turning yellow and hazy in the late afternoon; the Loggiata had no air-conditioning but relied on the time-honoured methods of fans and shutters and damp cloths hung in strategic places. They sat very still and breathed shallowly in the heat, he and Giuli and the wary Russian, and they waited.

  Take your time, Sandro thought. Don’t hurry down, little Anna Niescu, don’t worry that child you’re protecting so carefully, don’t raise your heartbeat. Give me time to think about how I’m going to give you this news.

  He had waited in a bar in a backstreet, a dirty little place. ‘I’ll be there in a bit,’ Pietro had said, rolling his eyes and dismissing Sandro. ‘Wait for me.’

  He’d walked in ten minutes later, frowning down at his mobile, and had called right there and then, from the bar. The seedy barman had eyed Pietro as he talked, his voice hushed and careful. Sandro had listened to one half of the conversation – the other half he could reconstruct on his own, from long familiarity and the occasional loud, gasping exclamation audible even from where he stood, a discreet metre from his old friend.

  ‘I’m so sorry,’ he’d heard Pietro say, again and again. He was better at this than Sandro ever had been; Pietro had a natural gentleness, where Sandro became gruff and brusque when he felt emotion struggling inside him.

  ‘I’m so sorry, Signora Brunello. Yes, yes – you need to have someone take care of the children, I don’t advise – no. Is there any relative you could leave them with? And perhaps someone to accompany you? It can be a very overwhelming experience.’

  You can say that again, Sandro had thought. Fo
r the police – on nodding acquaintance with the morgue, its smells and sounds, the unmistakable grey pallor of a dead face, the particular lividity of a bruise on dead flesh – it was bad enough. But for most bereaved fathers, wives, mothers, it was the first and only time. For Signora Brunello and those like her, this would be the single worst moment of their lives.

  She would come back into the baking city from the fresh salt air of the seaside, she would drive closer and closer, winding her window down to pay the toll that marked her entry into the inferno, and the choking, intolerable heat would roll in like poison gas. Coming back for this.

  Pietro had hung up, looking grave.

  ‘Glad I don’t have to do that any more,’ Sandro had said, to comfort him, before realizing that that was just what he would have to do, and soon.

  Now the Russian looked up from her magazine, sharp-eared as a cat, and Sandro turned to follow her glance. Anna Niescu came towards them through the glazed door from the loggia lopsidedly carrying a mop-bucket, and the eagerness in her face made Sandro scowl. Giuli, who knew what that scowl meant, nudged him sharply.

  ‘Miss Niescu,’ he said, getting to his feet. She set the mop-bucket down, searching his face, and Sandro took her hand in both his. It felt as small as a child’s, and hot.

  The Russian girl muttered something that sounded like a curse in her own language and hauled the mop-bucket behind the desk. ‘Too heavy,’ she said in her accented Italian. ‘I tell you, I will carry this for you.’

  ‘Can we talk somewhere – private?’ asked Sandro, looking from Anna to the receptionist. The Russian nodded towards the door through which Anna had arrived.

  ‘Outside,’ she said.

  Anna kept looking up at Sandro as they walked, but he couldn’t look back. He tried not to think of Claudio Brunello, of the Claudio Brunello he had seen, stiffened and bloodless and insulted by the elements, inhuman behind the soiled oleanders as cars roared past. He pushed open the door to let her through ahead of him.

  The open loggia, stretching perhaps twenty metres of dusty cotto under its beamed and tiled roof, was set with groupings of old cane chairs and low tables. The furthest of them were laid for tomorrow’s breakfast. A table for four and one for two; August was a quiet month, but even so. Six guests were not enough to support a place like this.

  ‘It’s cool in the mornings,’ said Anna, seeing him looking. ‘All of our guests like to have their breakfast here.’ She gestured for him to sit, pulled out a chair for him, and he came around behind her and did the same for her. Giuli managed on her own.

  And then they were seated, and it had to be said.

  ‘Anna,’ he said, as gently as he could, ‘I’m afraid there’s some bad news.’

  She stared, and her soft brown eyes seemed to darken, and there came into them an awful knowingness that perhaps had always been there, the last vestige of the abandoned child she had once been.

  ‘Bad news?’ she said quietly, and her small hands sat on either side of her belly, stilling it.

  ‘An accident,’ said Sandro, the dreadful deceitfulness of the word sour in his mouth. Giuli leaned across and took Anna’s hand, and the girl’s head tilted back just a little, her hand came up to cover half her face.

  Sandro leaned close, to draw her back to him. ‘A man was – the police think he was struck by a car, out – out near the Viale Amendola. The African market: do you know the African market?’ He saw her face bleach with fear and confusion. ‘We think he may be your fiancé. He had some documentation on him.’

  And Anna Niescu let her hand fall and looked into his eyes. Her mouth was trembling and she began to shake her head. ‘No,’ she said, ‘no, I – no. The African market? Why would he be there? On the viale?’

  And Sandro had nothing to say to that, because she must know by now, mustn’t she? That her beloved Josef wasn’t what he seemed. Anna Niescu was not stupid. ‘I’m sorry,’ was all he could think of. And then, ‘I’m afraid we will need you – to identify him. To come and make sure.’

  And then the hand flew to her mouth to stifle an awful sound, because now she understood. That this was real: there was a body, and she must look at it.

  ‘Yes,’ she said, eyes wide, blinking to stifle the tears, but Sandro could see them.

  They had talked about this. He and Pietro.

  ‘The wife, first, of course,’ Sandro had said, and silently Pietro had compressed his lips in agreement. Not a matter of the law, but of propriety. It wasn’t for them to judge the rights and wrongs in Brunello’s marriage.

  ‘She said she would probably be able to get here by six,’ Pietro had said. ‘She’s leaving the children in Monterosso, with their grandmother.’

  ‘His mother?’

  Sandro had been aghast: first one, then others, the bereaved always multiplied like this. Pietro had shaken his head. ‘Hers.’

  Was that a mercy? Silently they had agreed that it was.

  And then, drily, reluctantly, because it was almost certainly in defiance of protocol, Pietro had said, ‘I imagine you would like – to be there?’

  And, as reluctantly, Sandro had said that he would. Tried to calculate the horrible logistics of talking to Anna, getting over to the morgue to observe the wife and her reactions, and then bringing Anna herself, the pregnant lover, to take her turn identifying the body.

  ‘Do you want me to come now?’ said Anna, and her hands moved, reaching about her pointlessly for something that might aid her: handbag, cardigan.

  ‘Not quite now,’ said Sandro. ‘There are – procedures first, that the police have to carry out.’

  She looked at him blankly, but nodded. Ever obedient. Sandro felt a pang, because it was nonsense, wasn’t it? Procedures? Lies, was more like it. Lies and evasions: when would it end? When Brunello’s widow came face to face with this girl? Would they be able to avoid that?

  Almost certainly they would not. If they wanted to make a case for suicide, then they would have to produce something beyond the happy family, on holiday by the sea, the comfortable job. The expensive car.

  Where was it, that car?

  ‘He took the car,’ Pietro had said shortly. ‘I didn’t want – to go too much further. On the phone. But she said, he took the car, she’d been using the little runaround they keep by the sea.’

  ‘Little runaround,’ Sandro had repeated. It said everything.

  Outside the Loggiata, the builders’ noise had started up again, although the light was mellowing as the afternoon wore on. Bang, bang, bang: there was something vicious about it, something sullen and monotonous and horrible. With every report Anna Niescu’s shoulders contracted, like an animal drawing into itself under attack.

  ‘I don’t think it can be until tomorrow morning,’ said Sandro on impulse, seeing a way through those logistics. He knew what it would mean for her, but it was suddenly imperative that Brunello’s wife – widow – should be long gone before Anna got there. ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘Tomorrow?’ Her voice was an anguished, disbelieving whisper.

  ‘I’ll come back for you,’ said Sandro. ‘You should rest, if you can.’

  She looked at him vaguely: she was pale and her skin gleamed with sweat. Sandro was brought up short by the realization that, whatever happened, within a month this child would be giving birth to another. Perhaps sooner than that.

  ‘I’ll stay with you,’ said Giuli to Anna gently, arm around her shoulders.

  ‘Oh, no,’ said Anna quickly, vaguely, ‘I’ve got work to do. The kitchen has to be ready for the morning.’

  ‘Anna,’ said Sandro, ‘I know you would like to keep busy, perhaps. But think of your baby. Concentrate on your baby: that’s the important thing.’ He saw her mouth form a little ‘O’ as she breathed, saw her place a hand between her breasts to calm herself.

  ‘Yes,’ she said. A little colour returned to her face as she stayed very still.

  ‘Let me stay,’ said Giuli again. ‘Just see how we go. I can help you, in the kitc
hen, if that’s what you want to do.’ She darted a glance at Sandro. ‘All right?’

  He nodded just once, quickly. Giuli took Anna by the wrists gently and held her gaze. ‘All right?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Anna and, as so often happened, it was the kindness that brought the tears. The bad news shattered them, dried their eyes and mouths, paralysed them, but it was the arm around the shoulder that made them cry.

  Below the lovely, crumbling loggia, the builders had at last stopped banging; they were slinging scaffolding joints into a barrow instead, on their way out. The three sat without speaking until at last the noise was no more than the echo of the final steel-capped boot. Sandro left the two women there, so close they were almost one, the neat black cap of hair pressed in under Giuli’s chin.

  As he left, Sandro nodded his brief thanks to the Russian. She looked up, beady-eyed as a bird.

  ‘What is it?’ she said. ‘Is bad news?’ She spoke warily, wanting information, prepared to give nothing away herself.

  ‘Bad news,’ said Sandro. ‘Yes.’

  ‘She don’t deserve it,’ said the girl. It was delivered bluntly, but contained within it also the fatalistic recognition that rarely are the good rewarded.

  She might have been beautiful, with her thick black brows and her white, white skin, if she didn’t seem so angry, angry even before she knew why they were here. What was she angry about? Being here, in August, being far from home? Perhaps it was just a Russian characteristic. Defiance and anger.

  ‘No,’ Sandro said. ‘She deserves better.’

  CHAPTER TEN

  THERE WAS A SUITE of rooms at the police morgue, for the receiving of family members; one of them had a viewing room behind a one-way mirror. Behind it Sandro sat and watched Pietro as he stood beneath a large and ornate black crucifix, his hands clasped earnestly, talking to Claudio Brunello’s wife – widow. Sandro knew they wouldn’t let him in the room, although he’d tried.