Dead Season Read online

  ‘Sorry,’ Pietro had said, shifting a glance at Matteucci, the northern dolt, who had obstinately refused to understand what Sandro was doing there at all. (‘Say that again? He’s who?’) Pietro had spread his hands. ‘Best I can do.’

  They had viewed the body.

  She’d said six, but Irene Brunello had been there at ten to. From the long window to the small office Pietro shared with half a dozen others and once with Sandro too, they saw her park her small yellow car – a brand-new Punto, so bright, so jaunty, so appropriate for the beach cafés and villas of Monterosso, so grimly wrong for the car park of the big grey police station on the ring road at Porta al Prato.

  ‘We’ve got the car on CCTV entering the city,’ Pietro had said abruptly as they watched. His eyes had been sad although Sandro hadn’t known whom his old friend pitied most: Sandro for his stubborn resistance to the obvious, messy explanations, the dead man, or the dead man’s wife. ‘A silver Audi. Twelve-thirty, he came through the motorway toll at Firenze Nord. The car, the number plate, his face at the wheel.’

  ‘Quick work,’ Sandro had said. ‘Good work.’ He averted his eyes. ‘You don’t know where the car is now.’

  ‘We’ll find it.’

  Somehow they had known, he and Pietro and even Matteucci, even before her slim, tanned sandalled foot first touched the ground, her trim, straight-backed figure, that it was Irene Brunello in that little car.

  Early forties: a good age for a woman, or should be, the fierce anxieties of youth all done with, the hard work of child-rearing easing off, enough money coming in. Given the right circumstances in life, of course, given health, given family, children, a happy marriage.

  To Sandro, far above, and observing her framed in a great window twice as high as he was, Irene Brunello had looked as if she’d had all that, until today.

  Sandro had hovered as they’d greeted her sombrely; she had been too distracted to ask who he was. The tears had dried – she seemed a woman of strong character, bound to the proprieties, to not breaking down in public – but they had left their traces. Her handsome face was puffy and the seaside tan, overlaying drawn and anxious features, had the effect of making her look older than her years. This was entirely a grieving widow, he had no doubt. There had been a quick handshake, the exchange of formal greetings that implied condolence but also avoided the word itself, not wanting to make assumptions.

  ‘Let me see him,’ she had said, a twist of handkerchief at her mouth.

  She knows it’s him, Sandro had thought. Some women refused to believe it: I said goodbye to him only this morning, they’d say. It can’t be. Not this wife.

  Sandro had stood outside the door, looking in through the square of reinforced glass; he’d seen her head dip as they drew back the sheet. There had been no way of putting that face back together, but there had been enough of it left, so that if it was familiar enough, if you loved it enough – he had seen her nod, twice. He had seen Pietro gesture down towards the hand, with its wedding ring; she had taken the hand between hers.

  Damn, he had thought, damn, damn. Her husband was dead, and there was worse to come.

  ‘I’m so sorry,’ Pietro had said, leading her into the interview room, motioning gently for her to sit. Now from the door Sandro watched her intently: Irene Brunello didn’t cry. She sat very still, dignified; she began to speak before any questions were put to her.

  ‘We have already been at the seaside for a month – the children and I. My mother’s house.’

  In those dark eyes Sandro thought he saw something and wondered how her husband had got on with his mother-in-law. Whether he felt they should be able to afford a seaside place of their own. Did she reproach him with it?

  She was going on, doggedly, ‘Claudio always stays on to work until the first weekend in August. Always, he’s—’ She stopped, staring. ‘He was very conscientious. He would come up at weekends, through July. The city’s so unbearable—’

  She broke off again, looking from one face to another: Pietro, grave and patient, making notes, Matteucci uneasy – what was the point of all this, you could see him thinking, let’s get it over with. Sandro grim-faced and invisible behind the mirror.

  ‘It’s all right,’ said Pietro. ‘Take your time.’ Turning to Matteucci, ‘Could you get Signora Brunello some water, Officer?’

  Matteucci left the room, the set of his shoulders saying he didn’t care, at least he was out of there.

  Pietro turned back to Irene Brunello. ‘He came out for weekends?’ he prompted.

  She nodded, compressing her lips as she looked down at the handkerchief in her lap. ‘But once he was out for August, he was out. He wouldn’t go back to work, that was it, he was ours.’

  Her eyes widened, and in that phrase all that they had lost was encapsulated. The family table, on a shaded terrace overlooking the sea, the mother laying food in front of her husband, the children on his lap. Journey’s end: the reward for a year of hard work.

  And yet this man had been leading a double life. There were two women mourning him, another family waiting for him.

  A double life: was that reason enough for suicide? Two women in love with you, enough money, a child about to come into the world? And Sandro, who thought he had long since ceased to rage against his own childlessness, found a version of that fury rising in him. What laziness, what selfishness. What monstrous ingratitude.

  And yet. Something was not right.

  Irene Brunello’s husband was a good provider, a loving husband and father, a hard and conscientious worker. The man Anna Niescu trusted, whose child she carried – she had thought of him in similar terms, at least in prospect. Would such a man walk into traffic on a busy road to escape his responsibilities? Would he do it this way, would he do it at all? Nonsense. It was nonsense.

  ‘But this weekend?’ said Pietro gently.

  Irene Brunello straightened on the uncomfortable chair, and when she spoke it was calmly. ‘He arrived on Friday night, as he always did, the first Friday of August, at about eleven o’clock in the evening. He’d stopped for something to eat at the bar near work, and the traffic had been bad, he said.’

  She was a good witness: she was clear-headed. Sandro found himself nodding, and by instinct stopped himself, as if she could see him through the one-way glass and would know what he was thinking. Eleven o’clock: that would have given him time for close to an hour with Anna Niescu, who’d seen her lover at seven, out of the city by eight. He tried to remember what the traffic had actually been like that evening.

  She was still talking. ‘He brought some things for the children, as he always did. It was our tradition. A new beach toy – every year it must be a bigger one, this time it was an inflatable crocodile – and a big cake from our favourite pasticcere, on the Via dei Mille. Everything was fine. Everything was normal.’

  ‘And then?’

  Matteucci came back in with a bottle of water and a plastic cup; he filled the cup and set it on the low table. Irene Brunello didn’t even look at it.

  ‘And then on Saturday morning he took the car and said he was going to drive to La Spezia to do a big shop. There’s a giant supermarket there, much cheaper.’

  ‘Was that normal?’ La Spezia would be an hour’s drive, at least, from Monterosso, right at the other end of the Cinque Terre. A long drive on a Saturday morning.

  She shrugged, uncomfortable for the first time.

  ‘Not really.’

  She fiddled with the handkerchief again, not meeting anyone’s eye, then finally she looked up.

  ‘Usually we do our shopping in Monterosso, in little places, you know.’ She was talking nervously, trying not to think. ‘There’s a greengrocer, there’s a butcher, they’re good people. Or, at most, around the coast to Levanto. The supermarkets are small, they’re more expensive, but we’re on holiday, you know? But he had mentioned money, the night before. He seemed – preoccupied. He was saying, perhaps we should think about letting the holiday home next year. My
mother’s home.

  ‘And the next morning – Saturday morning – I thought I heard the phone ring; he must have answered it, if it did. I was busy with the children. It seemed odd to me – well, when he didn’t come back. The phone call, then the supermarket.’

  ‘Odd?’ Pietro leaned forward, alert. Even from where he stood, peering, his face close up to the glass, Sandro could see the wounded, bewildered look in the woman’s eyes.

  ‘I did ask him. We never use that supermarket. He was distracted. He mentioned money again. He said we had to be careful with money in the – in the current climate, that was what he said.’ A trace of painful indignation in her brimming eyes. ‘I’m not one of those women – who doesn’t think about the expense. I’m careful. Claudio gives me housekeeping—’

  And her eyes widened. Sandro could see her thinking, what next? Where will the money come from now?

  Claudio Brunello was trying to economize?

  ‘Do you think perhaps he might not have been telling the truth?’ Pietro’s voice was low. ‘Would you have been angry, for example, if he said he had to go back into work? Something like that?’

  Irene Brunello stared into his eyes, pale. ‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘I don’t know. It was a – a thing of ours. Once on holiday, then no calls from work, nothing.’ Sandro could see her absorb it, take the burden of guilt on herself. ‘I never meant – he never—’

  Don’t, thought Sandro, enough.

  ‘All right,’ said Pietro, soothing, and Sandro felt a small yet strong pulse of grateful affection, that their minds still seemed to run along the same track. Would they ever work together again, properly? Best not to think about it.

  ‘So,’ Pietro continued, doggedly patient. ‘On Saturday morning he said he would go to the supermarket.’

  She nodded, confusion in her eyes. ‘I made him coffee, I went out for pastries from the good baker’s. He likes something sweet in the morning.’

  Liked.

  ‘And then I took Laila to the beach, leaving him there with our son to have breakfast, that’s when I thought I heard the telephone, at about ten. I was putting the beach things in a basket. And after about fifteen minutes he brought Gianni, our son, down, and said he was going to the supermarket.’

  ‘And that was the last time you saw him?’

  Sitting on the warm stones of the beach at Monterosso, the turquoise sea behind her, the bright little condomini along the front, shading her eyes as she waved him off.

  ‘You didn’t report him missing?’

  She stared at Pietro with wonder, and Sandro already knew the answer before she gave it. Because once you went to the police, once they started checking the hospitals and the RTAs, you were halfway to widowhood. You were admitting the possibility. She just barely shook her head, clinging to that picture of her husband as she had last seen him, standing in the sun.

  ‘What will we do?’ she said, her face turned to Pietro, blank with the immensity of it.

  Sandro looked at her, at the mute appeal in her eyes; then at his old friend. You will ask, won’t you? he wanted to say, through the glass. Check out her story, talk to the mother, talk to the maid, where’s she been all weekend? Because it was at moments like this, when all your sympathy was engaged, when everything leaned one way, towards the grieving widow, that mistakes were made. So many murders were committed by someone close. Even if this was not a murder, but a suicide.

  He believed her, even through the one-way glass, he believed her, because he wanted to believe her. Was Pietro being sceptical enough?

  She said it again, ‘What will we do without him?’

  And nobody had any reply.

  *

  On the porch, listening to the cicadas in the trees and the vague, distracted sounds of her mother in the kitchen, Roxana stared into the warm, scented darkness of the garden and tried to make sense of it.

  It wasn’t easy. Today at the office had made home – the side of her life usually most resembling a madhouse – look like a haven of order and peace.

  ‘Darling,’ Violetta had said as she pushed her way wearily through the door, and had held her arms out. Full of affection, the bringer of comfort – was this new Ma just a new phase? Worn out, Roxana had decided to take it at face value. What the hell.

  ‘Ma,’ she said, letting her mother put her arms around her. ‘How was your day?’

  And Ma, perhaps still buoyed by her newly rediscovered powers of recall, had launched into a story about the Sicilian with his vegetable truck who had been selling watermelons at the end of the road. Where the melons had come from, how she’d known the man since he was a small boy selling with his dad, from the same truck. Roxana had sat down and let her mother talk. She had poured herself a small glass of white wine from the refrigerator, and when the story showed signs of drawing to a close, said, ‘I’ll be out at the back.’

  Sipping the wine – slightly sharp, she couldn’t remember how long that bottle had been there – Roxana thought about Marisa Goldman. She’d never seen her like that, Marisa whom nothing could touch, always perfectly composed, every little pretty detail of her life under control. Perhaps there were some things that money and good taste could not solve, after all. Roxana, however, for whom Marisa was a daily itch beneath the skin, found that she could not summon up even the most meagre satisfaction from the image of Marisa’s sallow, drawn features.

  ‘What did she say?’ In Marisa’s immaculate office Roxana had poured her superior a glass of cold water and looked intently into her pale face. ‘What exactly did Irene Brunello say?’

  And as Marisa had stared back at her dully, it had occurred to Roxana that perhaps she’d taken something too, a tranquillizer. Marisa was always popping pills: vitamins, sleeping pills, homeopathic and not so homeopathic. Perhaps life with the playboy billionaire wasn’t that much fun, after all. But eventually she had spilled it all out, except that, it turned out, all hadn’t really been that much.

  The police had got hold of Irene Brunello at Monterosso. They had found a body with Claudio’s ID on it – and Claudio had been gone since Saturday. She was frantic with worry – they all were, said Marisa, almost accusingly.

  ‘But she hasn’t identified him yet.’ Someone, Roxana had thought, had to be blunt; someone had to resist being frantic.

  A tight little shake of the head, no. Marisa’s face had been anguished. ‘But it doesn’t look good.’ She’d bitten her lip. ‘I offered to go with her, but she said no. I’m going over later, to their apartment.’

  Kneeling at Marisa’s side, Roxana had sat back on her haunches. ‘There’s something funny about all this,’ she had said, almost to herself.

  ‘All what?’ Marisa had spoken sharply and Roxana had hesitated.

  ‘A private detective came looking for him yesterday.’

  ‘What?’ Marisa’s voice had been a whisper. ‘You’re kidding, right?’

  Roxana hadn’t dignified that with a response; she had just continued, ‘He’s been gone since Saturday? So that’s why she was phoning. Why she phoned my home, looking for Claudio.’

  ‘Why would she phone you?’ A trace of the old haughtiness in Marisa’s voice.

  Roxana had merely looked at her. ‘I don’t know, Marisa,’ she had said patiently. ‘Maybe your phone was off, maybe there was no signal out there on the boat. I mean, clearly I would have been a last resort.’ She’d frowned. ‘It must have been she who phoned here, at the bank, yesterday. God, Val’s a moron.’

  And right on cue, the clump of biker boots in the foyer had announced Valentino’s arrival. Stiffly, Roxana had got to her feet. ‘I’ll tell him, shall I?’ she’d said.

  Marisa had rubbed her face with both hands, shivered even though the air-conditioning was barely making a dent in the temperatures. ‘No,’ she had said. ‘It’s all right.’ And she had moved to her position of authority behind the desk, the bright turquoise of her shirt incongruous against the steel and leather. ‘Send him in.’

  ‘What
?’ Valentino had said, pulling off his helmet as Roxana walked past him, catching her expression, his eyes following her. She had nodded towards Marisa’s office.

  ‘Something’s happened, Valentino,’ she’d said. ‘Go and talk to her.’

  *

  Inside the house, her mother was singing, some old ballad about laying a table for a wedding meal. She had a good, clear voice, but it was a long time since Roxana had heard her sing like this. Perhaps not since Luca had been a kid, and Ma used to sing him to sleep. On the porch in the dark Roxana leaned back and closed her eyes.

  Had she wanted Valentino to be shocked out of that cheerful selfishness of his? Had she wanted to see if there was any more to him? And why should she care in any case?

  She’d gone and stood at the big pinboard where notices of whatever new account or savings bond they were promoting were put up, her back to Marisa’s office. Ridiculously, all she could think was how tatty it all looked. What a stupid dead end of a dump this bank was and how Maria Grazia was right, she had to go.

  There’d been no sound from the office – though the door had been closed and perhaps she wouldn’t have heard anything anyway. She had walked slowly around the room, turning on the lights, replenishing the deposit and withdrawal slips, resetting the ticket machine before finally she’d flicked the switches that released the security doors and declared the bank open for the afternoon’s business. What there was of it.

  If she’d wanted to see Val shaken, then she had had her wish. Turning from the door, she saw him emerge from Marisa’s office, and his carefully cultivated stubble stood out dark against the pallor of his face.

  ‘You all right, Val?’ she’d said.

  ‘What?’

  She’d thought he was going to cry, his staring eyes hardly focused on her. Gently she’d put out her hand, touched his arm. ‘It’s a shock,’ she’d said. ‘Take it easy.’