A Florentine Revenge Read online

  ‘I don’t think I’m doing anything,’ she said, not really applying her mind to the question.

  Gabriele put his cap on and stood square and solid in front of her. ‘I – well,’ he said, ‘I think you need a break. You’re looking worn out yourself.’ Maybe I am, thought Celia, feeling the effects of the wine wear off, wanting her bed.

  Gabriele went on, ‘Why don’t you come down to Rome with me for a day or two? My mum could feed you up.’ Despite herself Celia laughed.

  ‘I don’t need feeding up,’ she said. ‘I’d love to meet your family, though, that would be great. Sometime.’ Impulsively she leaned up and gave him a kiss on the cheek; he stood there, serious. ‘Thank you, Gabri,’ she said, ‘thanks for everything.’ Still he didn’t move, looking at her as though there was something else he wanted to say, but Celia was too tired, suddenly, to think about what it might be. ‘I’ll talk to you tomorrow, sweetheart,’ she said, and then he did turn for the door at last.

  As she leaned her back against the door and listened to Gabriele’s steps recede Celia thought, I’m lucky, to have friends like Gabriele. And Beate, and even Jo Starling, out there in the dark somewhere. But I’m lucky to have my own place, too, somewhere all to myself. And then she thought only of her bed.

  14

  Sandro was gone when she opened her eyes. It was late, too: she’d left the shutters open and without the nets the pale winter light flooded the bedroom. The same room they’d slept in since they were married – slippery satin bedcover, glass ornaments on the shelf, veneer dressing table polished to a high shine – but it looked different. Registering the time, with an exclamation Luisa leaped out of bed.

  It was cold in the kitchen. In the sink stood the small aluminium pot Sandro had used to make himself coffee – the one he always used. Luisa remembered that only yesterday, after that lunch and a peaceful afternoon idly dreaming in the shop, she had even begun to think they might be getting up together now and again. Standing side by side in the kitchen, half asleep in the early morning. She stared at the little coffee pot, the single tiny cup with its dregs.

  It had been Sandro, of course, who else at one in the morning opening the door with his own key? But in the space of a short winter afternoon, it seemed, the tiny budding growth of possibility she had felt – no more than that, not even hope, not yet – was frost-blasted, over before it had begun. Sitting up in bed, Luisa had heard him sigh in the narrow confines of the hall, hanging up his coat, and he walked slowly into the kitchen as though he was dragging something with him. She heard him pour a glass of something. She waited.

  He started as he came into the room, his face white in the moonlight as though she was a ghost sitting there in the bed. She could hear her own heart beating as he stared at her.

  ‘What is it?’ she’d said, faltering, a hand up to her hair that stood out madly around her head.

  In the kitchen now Luisa pulled the robe around her, and involuntarily she closed her eyes. She felt a heaviness in her chest, a weight of blame she shared with Sandro for never having talked to him about it. She should have asked him, begged him if need be, to tell her what was on his mind, what he had seen. All these years, that was what he had needed, and she had said nothing. Mechanically she stood up and walked back into the bedroom. She began to take down the clothes she would need. Saturday; it would be busy so close to Christmas.

  Sandro had crossed to his side of the bed, sat down heavily and put his face in his hands.

  ‘What?’ Luisa had repeated, gingerly putting a hand to his shoulder. ‘It’s the suicide, isn’t it? You’re blaming yourself—’ But he interrupted her. His voice, when it came, was muffled.

  ‘It’s worse than that,’ he said. ‘I wouldn’t have lost sleep over that.’

  ‘Then what?’

  ‘He didn’t kill himself,’ said Sandro, lowering his hands. His face was white, drained. ‘Bartolo was murdered.’ He took his hands away from his face and stared at her. ‘Do you know what that means?’

  Bewildered, Luisa had shaken her head.

  ‘It’s down to me,’ said Sandro. ‘Ever since – these last fifteen years, I’ve been passing on information. What we know, things we found at the scene, the condition of the body, telling him about Bartolo’s form, his whereabouts. Things no one outside the force was supposed to know. And now he’s dead.’

  ‘Who?’ said Luisa. ‘Telling who?’

  He looked at her. ‘The father, of course. The girl’s father.’ Luisa stared. Sandro went on, talking quickly, insistently in the dark as though he was in a confessional, mumbling to a priest.

  ‘They changed their name, did you know that? The girl’s parents. That’s why no one ever heard anything more about them. They wouldn’t talk to anyone, no press, no counselling service.’ Sandro looked up at her at that, and made a small, gruff sound. ‘A bit like us, hey?’ He looked down again. ‘It was as if they were ashamed, as if they’d done something wrong, not him. Not Bartolo.’ Luisa nodded, remembering their faces, heads down as the television camera watched them emerge from the police station.

  Oblivious, Sandro went on. ‘I had the new identity, the new address, of course. So I wrote, one day I just sat down and wrote, all the things I knew. Every time I got a piece of evidence, I passed it on. And he wrote back sometimes. He wrote when his wife died. She killed herself with an overdose, a year after. Exactly a year.’ Sandro paused, musing. ‘He wasn’t asking for sympathy. Just the facts, this has happened, on this day, like this. A bit like a policeman.’

  Luisa felt sick. ‘And – the DNA test?’

  Sandro nodded. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I sent him a photocopy of the result, about a month ago. Inconclusive.’ His voice was as savage as it had been in the Bar La Posta, the last time he’d spat that word. ‘I’d let him hope. And it came back, inconclusive.’

  Luisa thought of those letters, letters full of dangerous information, like bombs, passing across the continent. Where were they sent? Not to the station, surely, where anyone might have opened them. Not here, either. If Luisa had seen foreign postmarks, a stranger’s writing, she would have suspected something. Suspected what? An affair, a betrayal? Or would she? She saw herself, wound up tight for fifteen years in a kind of shroud, not seeing, not wanting to see, only thinking about the shop, stock, window displays, the right shoes to wear to work.

  Seeing her face, Sandro said softly, ‘I had a box number. At the post office.’ Helplessly he shrugged. ‘Would you have wanted to know?’ Luisa just shook her head, not to agree, but to shake something loose in there, to understand.

  Sandro went on. ‘It seemed so intolerable that we couldn’t pin it on him, that no one could get to him. That you should lose a child like that, broken and thrown away like rubbish, and nothing to be done. Everyone in Galluzzo knew, but Bartolo didn’t care.’

  ‘So when they said Bartolo had committed suicide,’ Luisa said slowly, closing her ears to the sound of Sandro’s voice cracking at the mention of the child, ‘you didn’t believe it, not even at the beginning?’

  ‘No,’ said Sandro, ‘I knew he’d never kill himself, never.’ He looked down at his hands. ‘I persuaded myself it might have happened. We were all doing that. It’s still the official line. But they know now, you see. He was bound, ligature marks on hands and wrists. Angle of the cut all wrong, too, he couldn’t have reached that far around. No tentative marks – you know, almost no one can just slash their own throat like that, one decisive cut. Whoever did it left the knife, cut-throat razor it was, but the trajectory was wrong, it couldn’t have fallen from his hand where they found it.’ He spoke mechanically, as though he was in the witness box, rehearsing evidence for the jury.

  ‘It might have been anyone, though,’ said Luisa, trying to sound reasonable. ‘He wasn’t exactly popular, was he? Like you said, everyone knew.’

  Sandro shook his head slowly. ‘What if they find out?’ he said, and there was something in the way he spoke that made Luisa’s heart sink. She
took his hand, and he looked up at her and said, ‘It was like putting a loaded gun in his hands, wasn’t it? I wanted him to act. I wanted him to do something. And now he has.’

  At her dressing table in the cold light of morning Luisa brushed her thick dark hair, twenty strokes. She buttoned her coat; it was going to be another cold day.

  ‘Let’s start with coffee,’ said Emma, putting an arm through Celia’s. She looked a different person this morning, her cheeks bright with colour. She was wearing a cherry-red coat and stood out in the Regale’s expensively neutral lobby like a dancing girl. ‘Not here, though.’ She looked around the pale, tasteful space with ambivalence.

  ‘Isn’t it what you wanted?’ said Celia, her heart sinking. It was difficult to relax, even when a client had her arm through yours. Was this going to be a complaint?

  ‘No, no, it’s lovely,’ said Emma. ‘Wonderful. It’s just that sometimes – don’t you find these places feel rather – confining? Lucas is used to it, I suppose. His office is rather like this.’ She laughed, not entirely happily.

  ‘Where is his office?’ asked Celia, by way of polite conversation. She wondered where Lucas Marsh was now, and what his plans for the morning might involve.

  ‘Oh, in the City,’ said Emma vaguely. ‘I’ve only been there once; I don’t think he was quite comfortable with me there.’ Celia could imagine it, the brightness of her, Lucas Marsh frowning at a desk. They turned for the door and she saw the dark, serious-looking concierge look over at them and raise a hand as if to attract Emma’s attention, and Celia stopped.

  ‘He works all the time, you know,’ Emma was saying, almost as though she was talking to herself. ‘Don’t you sometimes wonder what they do, those men in offices, sitting behind their desks? It’s not as if we need the money. Taking calls at midnight, meeting people at all hours. He’s up there working now.’ Then she stopped. ‘What is it?’

  ‘The concierge,’ said Celia, nodding towards the desk.

  ‘Signora Marsh?’ the man asked. ‘There is a letter for your husband. A small package. He is in your suite still?’

  Automatically Emma put out a hand to take the package the concierge pulled from a rack of wooden pigeon holes. Celia registered a cheap, flimsy envelope addressed in very un-English rounded, curling letters, and without a stamp, loose inside it something roughly the size and shape of a fat chocolate bar, or a mobile phone. Hand-delivered. Emma Marsh’s hand paused in mid-air, then she put it to her mouth.

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘He’s working. Perhaps you might take it up to him? I’m just on my way out, you see.’ She smiled her charming, well-bred smile, but Celia saw that her eyes were frightened and she looked away, feeling suddenly like a spy.

  ‘Shall we go now?’ said Emma, a little breathlessly. Her arm was no longer through Celia’s and without waiting for an answer she made for the wide glass doors. Is he betraying her, wondered Celia. Emma Marsh seemed wounded, somehow, by the arrival of the letter. Is he one of those men who has mistresses all over the world? She couldn’t imagine it somehow, and the crumpled envelope had not looked like a love letter.

  They were shown to a window table in the warm, wood-panelled tea room of the Caffè Gilli on the square. Emma Marsh spent some time settling herself in the padded leather, looking in her handbag for lipstick, a wallet, smoothing her hair. Celia waited, and the movements became less flustered, the agitation subsided and finally Emma Marsh gave a little sigh and smiled. She looked more at home here; she suited the old-fashioned prettiness of the tea room. The waiter who appeared at her elbow within seconds seemed to agree, eyeing her with undisguised approval. Celia ordered a caffè latte, thinking for a second of Beate, sitting in the Maoli and treating the drink as though it were medicine. Emma Marsh ordered hot chocolate with whipped cream.

  ‘And a pastry,’ she added with certainty. ‘Could you choose for me?’ She gazed up at the waiter and he nodded, mute with admiration. As he left, Emma unbuttoned her cherry-coloured coat, and Celia couldn’t help gazing at it, a narrow edging of velvet on the collar, the heavy, deep-dyed wool, big pearly buttons. She felt an unfamiliar and frivolous urge, a longing to wear something bright and impossibly expensive, to gleam like this, to abandon her plain, dark, carefully maintained uniform. She looked up and saw that Emma was watching her, and laughed.

  ‘Nice, isn’t it?’ Emma said, stroking the scarlet wool with satisfaction. ‘Lucas bought it for me.’ She hesitated, then went on with a carelessness Celia wasn’t quite convinced by, ‘Oh, yes, I meant to say straight away. I’d – we’d like you to stop with us for a drink, at least, this evening. At the Palazzo Ferrigno? As our guest, not – not as a job.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Celia, touched. Yes, please, was her first thought. ‘That would be – that’s very sweet of you.’ Then, imagining the brazier-lit terrace of the Palazzo Ferrigno, the sombre staterooms, What shall I wear? Emma Marsh smiled at her gaily. ‘Perhaps we can find you a cocktail dress this morning? On our shopping expedition?’ Despite herself, Celia laughed. ‘Maybe,’ she said, wondering if Emma Marsh had the slightest idea where Celia usually bought her clothes.

  ‘That’s settled then,’ said Emma, and she took off her coat. Underneath it she was wearing a dress of the same red with a low neck and a wide skirt. It was close-fitting and narrow at the waist, and as she admired it Celia remembered with a start that Emma Marsh was pregnant.

  ‘Not quite three months,’ said Emma, watching her, and it occurred to Celia that not for the first time Emma was answering a question she had not asked, only thought. The thought passed through Celia’s mind that her client was a clever woman. An observant woman. ‘I don’t feel any different at all,’ Emma said carelessly. ‘Isn’t that funny?’

  ‘It’s probably quite normal,’ said Celia, thinking of Kate fussing over cravings and swollen ankles before she was two months pregnant. ‘With your first baby. I mean, some people don’t realize for months, do they?’

  ‘Perhaps I’m in denial,’ Emma said, shrugging. ‘But sooner or later, I suppose I will get fatter. I can go shopping for a few things to grow into, can’t I? But no maternity clothes, not yet. Awful.’ She made a face, then her expression grew serious. ‘And I don’t think Lucas would like it, somehow.’

  ‘But surely – he must be pleased?’ Celia regretted the question straight away. What if he wasn’t? Emma looked down, circling the lace on the tablecloth with a neat fingernail. ‘Mm,’ she said uncertainly. ‘Well,’ she flushed now, ‘it wasn’t planned exactly. I think he’s pleased, I mean, I’ve hardly had time—’ She broke off and with sudden clarity Celia realized that Emma Marsh had waited to tell him until they were here, in this romantic city. No wonder he had seemed distracted that first morning, in the hotel room.

  The waiter appeared with a silver tray and with elaborate ceremony laid down cups, pastries, napkins, a jug of iced water. When he had gone Emma looked straight at Celia. ‘I only told him yesterday morning,’ she said. ‘It was – difficult. He’s older and – I’m not his first wife, you see, perhaps you could tell.’ She darted a glance at Celia. ‘No,’ said Celia truthfully. ‘Actually, it didn’t occur to me.’ Although in retrospect it was obvious.

  ‘But he likes children,’ Emma said. ‘I know maybe he doesn’t look much like that kind of man, but he’s got godchildren. A god-daughter at least, he’s got a soft spot for her. He keeps her picture in his desk.’ She looked at Celia as if admitting that this wasn’t much in the way of evidence. Her confidence seemed all gone, her brightness. She went on, ‘He had a hard time with his first wife, I’m not quite sure what happened, you see, but I can tell it was unhappy.’ She tailed off and looked down at her chocolate cup with a perplexed expression, like a child unable to explain some new and troubling fact about the adult world.

  ‘You don’t know?’ said Celia, unable to disguise her incredulity. It seemed hardly believable that a clever woman should know so little about her own husband. After all, he might be Bluebeard. Celia knew it was no
t quite rational, nor even practical at her age, but she distrusted men on their second marriage. How hard could it be, to make a marriage work?

  Emma shrugged uncomfortably. ‘He’s a very private person,’ she said stubbornly. ‘I didn’t want to – upset him.’ She looked at Celia. ‘It’s not as if – they didn’t divorce, or anything,’ she said patiently. ‘Nothing like that.’

  Celia frowned. ‘So…?’ She didn’t understand.

  ‘She died,’ said Emma. ‘Lucas was a widower when I met him.’ And she picked up the long silver spoon and poked it into the tower of whipped cream. ‘He’ll come round,’ she said decisively, retrieving a spoon of the dark, glossy chocolate from underneath, then another. ‘Lovely,’ she said, licking the spoon, and Celia could see that the subject was closed.

  From the window of her office over the gatehouse of the Palazzo Ferrigno Paola Caprese looked down into the narrow, cobbled street outside. On the corner a couple of men muffled up in hats and layers of coats had set up a brazier, raking coals in an old oil drum, a half-full sack of chestnuts leaning against the wall beside them. It was a pretty scene, but Paola, who was not susceptible to prettiness, only wondered if they had a permit; this wasn’t a regular patch for chestnuts, too far off the beaten track. She thought they must be cold out there; the street was still in deep shadow and the cobbles were steely with frost. Further along, though, where the road widened to meet the bridge, the winter sun shone yellow on the facades of the Piazza Goldoni. It was a beautiful day.

  Paola was thinking about the week’s bookings, a reception in the gallery, a conference and on Friday a charity cocktail party for 500 thrown by some English duchess. Paola couldn’t imagine where they got their money, these English aristocrats. Their Italian counterparts had crumbling frescoed palaces to spare, but no cash; they were the charity cases themselves, to hear them complain. But the English – what did they make there, after all? Paola herself was from a peaceful, industrious town in the Po valley where every household had heavy machinery in the garage, churning out knitwear or lace or handbags on piecework. In England, as far as she could tell, there was no art, no fashion, no leather, no glass, no steel; they didn’t make refrigerators or cars or precision instruments. Only some anonymous, murmured business in a grey skyscraper, columns of figures on a computer screen that translated into vast sums in their bank accounts and wads of cash handed over on the Via Tornabuoni.