The Drowning River Read online

  ‘Look,’ she said in English, ‘I don’t want any investigation; I’m not paying for any investigation. I’ve spent enough on that girl. She’ll turn up. I just – well. The police seem to think they need a – a representative of the family. You’ll have to do.’

  And Sandro had had to put up with the woman’s dismissiveness. He needed the business, he needed the contacts; if he upset Giovanna Badigliani, then Luisa would get upset and, besides, however much of a self-absorbed monster the mother was, a girl was missing.

  Had he detected, below the bluster and the recriminations, a note of guilt in Serena Hutton’s tirade? He hoped so, for the girl’s sake. And for Lucia Gentileschi’s sake he needed to put to sleep his ridiculous idea that Veronica Hutton’s disappearance had anything at all to do with her drowned husband.

  As he had stood there in the Via della Chiesa with his feet soaked, Sandro wondered if that was really what it was, just a ridiculous notion he’d got into his head. He had seen the girl on Tuesday morning, around eleven-thirty, walking through San Frediano, when by the limited evidence he had gathered, Claudio would also have been in San Frediano. Had she been walking towards the Boboli? She had been carrying her bag, certainly, so she hadn’t lost it there yet, and going vaguely in that direction; quite possibly following the route he had taken himself, straight along the Via della Chiesa towards the Via Romana and the back gate to the Boboli.

  So their paths might have crossed; that meant nothing. In his head Sandro turned over what the barman had said; Claudio the silent type with his regular habits, asking for his whisky sour and nothing more, so quiet they never guessed he didn’t live around the corner at all, but over the other side of town.

  Futilely Sandro had shaken out one shoe, then the other, but he hadn’t set off again, only stood in the limited shelter of the jutting eaves of a deconsecrated convent where, he read, Sister So and So had devoted her life to the rescuing of the city’s wanton girls. May she rest in God’s peace.

  She had not looked wanton, Veronica Hutton hurrying down the Via del Leone with her striped hair and her handbag slung over her shoulder; she’d looked pretty, anxious, eager; maybe a hint of a sharp edge to her, a tiny clue to what she might grow into, with a mother like the woman he’d just spoken to on the crackling line from Dubai. But, then, the older he got, the less ready he was to judge wantonness much of a crime anyway; look at poor old Giulietta Sarto, a life of prostitution was hardly a barrel of laughs, was it? Promiscuity – well, he didn’t like it, it didn’t make anyone happy, but the world was changing and there wasn’t a thing he could do about it. Did he still want women to marry as virgins?

  Damn, thought Sandro, on a tangent, he’d meant to call on Sarto at that women’s health centre place, get her out to lunch.

  He’d have to talk to Sarto about Luisa and her – her – he could hardly bring himself to say it, lump, even though lump didn’t have to mean the worse word. He had looked at it when she raised her shirt in the kitchen, and for a second it had been just flesh, just another of the body’s irregularities, the kind of thing you get used to as it all starts to sag and slide. And then in the blink of an eye it was something else; it was the future. It was waiting in queues at the clinic; it was having to wear a hospital gown that didn’t close at the back; it was fear.

  Luisa was the closest thing Sarto had to a mother, her own long since dead, consumed by drugs, Luisa the one waiting for her when she was released from the institution they’d kept her in after she was found unfit to plead. Giulietta Sarto would have to be told. The truth was, he wanted to sit down with and say it out loud to another human being. It might be cancer.

  And only then did he push himself away from the wall of the convent in the Via della Chiesa and set off, for his hastily arranged appointment with Maresciallo Falco of the Carabinieri, soaked to the bone and naggingly aware of having shaved badly that morning. In the thin morning light of the bathroom they had shared for their whole married life, his mind had been on Luisa’s expression as she left for work and not on his razor. Catching sight of himself in a shopfront, Sandro didn’t look like a policeman, or an ex-policeman; he didn’t even look much like a low-rent private detective. What he most looked like was a bum.

  It had made it worse, not better, of course that he was an ex-officer of the Polizia Statale; it would have made things easier if he’d been one of the private detectives off the hoardings with their toytown badges, fresh out of college. The girl’s mother should have looked one of those up in the yellow pages instead of talking to Giovanna Badigliani.

  Of course, it would be a Carabinieri case; they generally handled that kind of thing, petty theft, burglary, and, besides, if the bag was found in the Boboli it was a no-brainer, as the Americans would say. The Boboli housed the big and beautiful station that was their Florentine headquarters, set above the orangery in its own iris beds.

  He’d been there before. The Polizia Statale and the Carabinieri always acted in full co-operation. On paper they did, anyway. But even when he’d still been a policeman, in that building, among the southern boys with their cavalry officers’ uniforms, dark blue striped with red, Sandro had never had any kind of leverage, no inside track. Now he’d told himself that he was representing the girl’s mother, who could not be there and didn’t speak a great deal of Italian anyway; it was reasonable. And if they’d spoken to Serena Hutton already, there was the possibility that they’d be very happy indeed to deal with Sandro instead.

  At least they had let him in. The young couple under an umbrella at the entrance to the Boboli, making their minds up as to whether it could be worth going in – were they crazy? Sandro thought perhaps all foreigners were just crazy – looked at him curiously as he stood there bareheaded, but the girl in the booth just waved him through. The trees dripped on him as he made his way up to the big villa, the cold hallway echoed with the sounds of traffic and rain, and the little pudgy-faced desk officer made a meal of searching for his name on an admissions sheet. Then made him wait in a pokey lobby outside the maresciallo’s office for a good half an hour, because he was out.

  When eventually Maresciallo Falco returned, he sauntered in past Sandro without looking at him, his gloves in one hand, a tall, dark-skinned, handsome man. There was something about the way carabinieri walked, Sandro decided. Put his back up. And the man was perhaps twenty years younger than him.

  Falco disappeared into the office and a full ten minutes later Sandro was buzzed in. They didn’t get off to a good start when without preamble Sandro said briskly, ‘So, can we start at the beginning? Who found the bag?’

  It was like pulling teeth. Falco looked offended and promptly disappeared again for another ten minutes, during which time Sandro suspected him of doing nothing more productive than getting a coffee. On his return the maresciallo reluctantly handed over a thin cardboard file – soon there’d be no paper files, reflected Sandro gloomily, it would all be on computer – which contained a copy of the report. Sandro glanced at it, noted that it contained the name of the woman who’d found the bag, Fiamma DiTommaso, forty-nine years old, an address in the Via dei Bardi. Otherwise known as the Cat Lady.

  ‘It’s all in there,’ said Falco, obviously expecting that to be an end to it.

  ‘Um – might I just ask a couple of questions, Maresciallo?’ Sandro could hear himself, trying to be obsequious, and didn’t like it. Falco sighed, explosively, but stayed where he was.

  ‘Fiamma DiTommaso handed the bag in on Tuesday?’ said Sandro.

  ‘Tuesday evening,’ said Falco, looking away from him and out of the window. ‘Five o’clock.’

  ‘What did she say, this Cat Lady? Anything useful?’

  ‘She’s nuts,’ said Falco. ‘She’s only interested in her cats.’ Sandro nodded, wondering how that little exchange would have gone, Falco and the Cat Lady.

  ‘So she said nothing?’

  ‘She did a lot of muttering about her cats,’ said Falco tersely. ‘I’m surprised she bothered
handing it in at all.’ He seemed ready to jump up and show Sandro the door if he said another word about the Cat Lady.

  ‘OK, OK,’ said Sandro, hands up. He paused, gauging the best way not to sound offensive with his next question. ‘And you didn’t identify the owner – didn’t trace her to the Scuola Massi till Friday?’

  Tight-lipped, Falco said, ‘We assumed it had just been dumped by a mugger. It happens all the time.’

  Sandro breathed out. ‘Although there was money in the purse.’

  Falco shrugged, holding Sandro’s eye. ‘Had to dump it before he got a chance to look inside. That happens, too.’

  Sandro nodded cautiously.

  Falco went on. ‘And we conducted a full search of the immediate area.’ He paused. ‘Actually, that was when we found the card for the Scuola Massi.’ He allowed himself a smile. Great detective work, thought Sandro.

  ‘On Wednesday?’

  ‘Thursday. Wednesday the visibility was no good.’ Meaning, they had been hoping it would stop raining because they didn’t want to get their uniforms all wet. Lazy bastards.

  Sandro wrote it down, laboriously, feeling the man’s eyes on his bowed head. ‘Look,’ Falco said impatiently, ‘perhaps you would allow us to do our job.’

  ‘Did anyone see Veronica Hutton in the gardens on Tuesday?’ Sandro asked. ‘Park employees?’

  ‘We have put her photograph out to every employee,’ said Falco, ‘in the nursery, the orangery, the postcard shop, the Kaffeehaus, at each entry point, the maintenance workers, the stonemason. . .’ He paused for effect; all right, thought Sandro, I get the message. ‘But bear in mind that we only received a visual on her yesterday afternoon. And that Tuesday was sunny and the park was busy.’ He spread his hands. ‘So far, no one remembers seeing her.’

  ‘CCTV?’ asked Sandro quickly. ‘There didn’t seem to be anything in the report about CCTV. Have you got her on camera at all?’

  ‘We’re still processing the images,’ said the carabiniere stiffly.

  ‘But?’

  Falco pursed his lips. When he spoke it was as though he was himself delivering an official statement to camera, in a monotone. ‘There are two cameras in operation at present, at Palazzo Pitti and the Annalena gate. The Forte di Belvedere exit is currently out of use, and the Porta Romana camera isn’t functioning.’

  Sandro waited, and reluctantly Falco continued. ‘So far,’ he said, ‘we have what we believe to be an image of the girl entering the gardens via the Annalena gate, at twenty-five minutes past eleven on Tuesday morning. Carrying her bag.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘We haven’t managed to isolate an image of her leaving, as yet,’ said the carabiniere, tenting his long brown fingers on the desk and frowning at them. ‘But there could be various explanations for that.’

  ‘She could have left by the Porta Romana gate,’ Sandro said. ‘Or –’ Or she didn’t leave at all.

  ‘Or she might have been obscured by another departing visitor, or we might have missed her,’ said Falco. ‘As I said, we are still processing the images.’

  ‘Of course,’ said Sandro, knowing he was on borrowed time now, then casually, ‘but there’s been no sign of her in the gardens themselves? Since – since the bag was found?’

  ‘No,’ said Falco. He eyed Sandro with weary hostility. ‘We’ve conducted a full search.’

  They both knew that ‘a full search’ could mean anything from a cursory glance with a torch to a dozen men combing the undergrowth; Sandro suspected the former.

  As if Falco could hear his thoughts, the carabiniere fixed him with a look. ‘Of the immediate area and of the wider park. We have checked every tool store and glasshouse in the place. I told the girl’s mother this.’ He did not drop his eyes. ‘She’s not there.’ He leaned forward, and Sandro saw genuine gravity in his eyes, for once. ‘Look,’ he said, ‘this is my patch; this is my back yard, believe me, if she was – if she was still here, I’d know about it.’

  She wasn’t here, but she hadn’t gone.

  ‘You mean if she was dead?’ asked Sandro.

  Falco shrugged as if to say, You know what I mean.

  ‘I’m sure the girl’s mother’s satisfied you’re making every effort,’ said Sandro with formality. ‘I am sorry.’ And indeed it did seem as though Falco had been doing his job; a ballbreaker like Serena Hutton could have that effect, he supposed.

  Apparently mollified, Falco sat back in his chair, and when he spoke again he seemed almost conciliatory. ‘Look, we’ve got the girl’s computer,’ he said. ‘We’re looking at that, too, for emails, that kind of thing. Networking sites.’ Sandro nodded as though he knew what a networking site was. ‘Anything?’ he asked warily.

  Falco frowned. ‘Not so far,’ he said. ‘No boasting about a new boyfriend or a trip away, no emails from boys, no nasty stuff.’ He shrugged. ‘The other girl had an idea someone might have tampered with it, but apart from the battery being dead as a dodo, our computer guy said it was clean. If anyone did try to wipe anything off it, they didn’t know what they were doing, was what he said.’

  ‘Hold on,’ said Sandro. ‘The other girl thinks someone’s wiped it? What other girl?’

  ‘The girl,’ said Falco impatiently, ‘the room-mate; I’ve just come from there. She thought somebody might have got into the flat, looking for something last night.’ He shrugged. ‘Personally I think she was a bit hysterical.’

  Sandro cursed silently; why hadn’t the mother given him a single useful piece of information?

  ‘Right,’ he said, ‘you got a number for her?’ Eyeing him stonily, the carabiniere shook his head. Sandro’s heart sank; ask the mother.

  ‘One last thing,’ he said. ‘Could I see the bag?’

  As he picked his way down through the iris beds in the rain, the towering bulk of the Carabiniere station above him, Sandro’s gut churned. It had been the sight of the bag that had done it, scuffed and manhandled; the contents in their plastic. And the tiny stones, sifted with dust, at the bottom.

  He’d stared at them; powder-white.

  ‘I wonder, Maresciallo,’ he’d said quickly, fumbling in his pocket, ‘if I might make a request?’ Falco leaned forwards a fraction, suspicious already. Sandro kept his tone grave and respectful. He produced the crumpled photograph of Claudio Gentileschi. ‘If one of your men might have a quick look on that camera footage?’ Falco took the photograph and glanced at it with a frown, handed it back.

  ‘We’re very busy,’ he said. ‘Who is this man?’

  ‘It’s a long shot,’ said Sandro, finding himself unwilling to tell this man anything about Claudio. ‘There may be no connection.’

  Falco looked at him a moment from under hooded eyes, making him wait. Then he seemed to tire of the game, smiling briefly and without warmth. ‘Very well,’ he said, ‘give it to Giacomini.’ He nodded towards the door. ‘On your way out.’

  Giacomini was the pudgy-faced desk officer; he took the photograph with sublime indifference, photocopied it, returned it to Sandro, taking his time at every stage of the operation.

  There’ll be no image of Gentileschi, Sandro told himself, and there’ll be an end to it. The tall blades of the iris leaves scattered more rainwater across his feet, and he shivered; Luisa’ll kill me, he thought, and then he thought some more, about Luisa herself. Which was why, when the little telefonino rang in his breast pocket he didn’t hear it for a while. Luisa, wet feet, fever. The weather was clearing, a patch of late afternoon blue through the clouds, and what was that noise? He pushed his way out through the side gate and he was on the street.

  It was Lucia Gentileschi; as though she was already a friend, he knew her immediately.

  ‘Sandro?’ she said, and even though her voice was as soft and controlled as always there was something else in it. Confusion; fear.

  Instinctively he stepped back from the street, into the shelter of a shop awning; it wasn’t the rain, which was easing now anyhow; Sandro hated talking into a tele
fonino out on the pavement. It always seemed wrong to him when he saw people standing in the street shouting their business – or someone else’s – into a little machine and oblivious of where they were.

  ‘What is it?’ he asked. ‘What’s happened?’

  He turned his back on the street and found himself looking into the shop window; not a shop as it turned out but some kind of gallery – half the greengrocers in the city had been turned into galleries, it seemed to Sandro. He must have answered Lucia Gentileschi more sharply than he had intended because inside the shop a woman was staring curiously at him, a large canvas in her arms. Hurriedly he stepped away, crossed the street.

  ‘Can you come over to the house?’ Lucia asked. ‘I’ve found something.’

  ‘She’s nuts,’ said Jackson, with something like relief in his voice. ‘The wife? Yeah, totally, totally nuts.’

  There was a pause; they both looked through the wrought-iron gates, up the sodden gravel, between the leafless limes to where a fine mist of rain hung over the Boboli’s avenue of cypresses. In the ticket booth a bad-tempered young woman in several layers of cardigan and a padded coat gave them a glance before returning to her magazine; the man who’d been standing bare-headed in the rain moved off, talking on his phone.

  It seemed to be fine as long as they were talking about Massi and his crazy wife; Iris was suddenly in no hurry to ask Jackson what it was he was frightened of, or to mention Ronnie’s name, even. She was tired of it, that leaden feeling of apprehension, the permanent state of anxiety: the constant question, where is she? The long bus ride through town, the smell of wet wool and raincoats, umbrellas scattering rain on her stupid canvas shoes: all this and not much of a night’s sleep made her long only to forget about the whole thing. Made her wish she’d said she’d go back to Hiroko’s, drink jasmine tea, wait for news. Not rush about in the rain, knowing she was going back to the Piazza d’Azeglio alone tonight.