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  He heard a small sound from outside and opened his eyes. The crunch of footsteps on gravel: he stiffened, then relaxed. Pietro walking around the house. Sandro backed out of the room and turned to his right. The room that faced up the valley: like the first, it was quite empty. The wind must be eddying in the valley because in here it rattled the old shutters, one of them hanging askew from the frame. Sandro stepped over to the window and pushed the shutters back to see that the sky above the ridge at the head of the valley had turned a deep electric blue; the wind roared in the trees. Pietro must have heard the shutters because he appeared around the side of the house from the back. His face was very pale in the gloom.

  ‘All right?’ he called up, his voice sounding thin.

  ‘Give me another minute or two,’ said Sandro, his own voice carried away unearthly on the wind, but Pietro seemed to hear and nodded. Sandro stepped back into the room. This one he had more trouble remembering – it shifted around him somehow. He left the shutters open for the light they admitted. Something odd about the irregular shape of the room, and then he understood that there would have been a fireplace in one corner, above the kitchen, but it had been removed or sealed up. He stepped over to the place and tried to remember if it had been like that before, and failed.

  For a moment he felt a kind of despair, tinged with fear: they were too old to go back. Old women, old men. All too old. And the fear grew. Please, he thought, please, let me give up. Give it up.

  But he turned as if her hand was still in his and he was following. He stepped across the landing and into the room she’d let him into. Two large windows, one of them shutterless so the air and what was left of the light came in. He’d stood here, looking around at the floor, a sea of quilts and clothing, mattresses, but he had stopped counting now; everything had slowed since he came into this room.

  Then she had put her hand on him.

  She’d tugged at his trouser button, his newly issued paleblue and maroon uniform trousers, one hand down there and another at his neck, pulling his face towards hers, and her body touching his, the nipples touching him through the fabric of her shirt. She had been wearing – and he could remember it now as though it was still there between his body and hers – a thin blouse of pale blue, something like muslin, almost transparent it was so light, undone to her breastbone, and he had stared and sweated against her and stood there as Baratti’s voice, lower now downstairs, insinuating to whatever girl he was grilling, filled his ears. Jeering, taunting him: call yourself a man?

  His erection had sprung up, unbidden, treacherous, because when you were a boy that was what happened, and her hand had gone down to it and he’d heard himself make a sound – not a groan, a sound more high-pitched and desperate, or at least that was how he had heard it, over the roar of blood in his ears. She had knelt down in front of him and he had felt the hair go up on his head as she put him in her mouth.

  Pleasedontpleasedontpleasedont.

  And he’d stumbled back. Too soon for her, too late for him, spilling himself on her hand, making an incoherent sound, a sob, and she laughed at him. She had laughed.

  Never a boy to put it about, never, Sandro had been a shy young man. He had loved his mother and father and had begun to love Luisa, to love her way of holding his hand diffidently, of picking it up at regular intervals and lacing her small fingers between his. That had been the extent of their intimacy. He had no way of understanding what Johanna Nielsson had done to him.

  She had said something to him as she pressed against him that had sounded like her explanation but it wouldn’t come back to him now: it sat like a cobweb in the corner of his brain, a sticky filament waiting to settle on his skin if he took one step too far.

  Johanna Nielsson’s skin as she had stood, wiping her hand, and pressed herself hard against him, murmuring something. The smells of grass and incense and warm unwashed skin, of dead leaves and the soft silt of sluggish rivers.

  And then she’d come to find him in the city, to taunt him; she’d stood on tiptoe in her bare feet in the Uffizi’s courtyard and kissed him, and he hadn’t been able to stop her. He’d wiped his mouth, again and again, but too late. Love her? He hated her.

  He managed to get out of the room, his boots loud and clumsy on the stairs, and registered Pietro’s face in the hall, less pale now, his head turning as Sandro pushed past him to get outside before – before –

  Before he vomited, a sour spatter of minestrone across the stone step and the gravel beyond it.

  ‘Sandro?’ Pietro was talking to him, Sandro could feel a hand on his shoulder as he bent, hands planted on his knees, and vomited between them again, but for a second he was blind, and his old friend’s voice seemed distant over the sea-roar in his ears.

  At last it felt safe to stand up. He wiped his mouth with the back of his sleeve and didn’t look down at what he’d done.

  ‘I didn’t want – in there – I didn’t want to contaminate the …’ He couldn’t quite finish the sentence. Pietro patted him helplessly on the shoulder, peering uneasily into his face.

  He’d told Pietro. But hadn’t. He’d made it sound like – it had been something men do, not boasting of it, he couldn’t have done that, but dismissing it. A joke, an oddity, a titbit for the locker room. A blow job. He couldn’t say, I couldn’t stop her. He couldn’t say, it made me cry.

  He swallowed, bitterness in his throat, and took the three, four unsteady steps away from Pietro over to his car. There was a bottle of water in the glovebox and he drank it thirstily, standing in the open car door. He’d cried, that night, in the lavatory at his parents’ house, and he had wondered if his mother had heard him because she had stood a long time behind his bedroom door that night, without coming in.

  It had been his last visit to La Vipera – until today.

  *

  When he saw her name on the phone’s screen, he thought, why did I never tell her? I never told anyone. Luisa.

  ‘Darling,’ he said, composing himself. They’d just pulled up outside Martinelli’s house ‘We’re going to be late tonight, is that all right?’

  She had something to tell him: a couple of things.

  ‘Hold on,’ he said, because she was talking and he was still half in a daze. ‘Say that again? You think what?’

  She’d been talking to Frollini. The thought, which once might have nettled him, passed over him like water.

  ‘I think the old prince, Salieri, might have been having an affair with the man – Gorgone.’

  Sandro made himself digest this information but it said nothing to him in connection with this case. The old prince was long dead. Was it plausible? Yes. Gorgone – Gorgone was enough of a narcissist to take all homage offered him. And enough of an operator to know a golden goose when he saw one.

  ‘And Frollini doesn’t want me to go upsetting the princess.’

  He can whistle, Sandro thought but didn’t say.

  Luisa sounded tired. ‘Well, I did wonder if Benedetta might have had some kind of traumatic revelation back then. Witnessed something between her father and Gorgone. That could explain … all sorts of things. And did you know –’ she hesitated ‘– she inherits the estate? Did you know that? Not her half-brother?’

  ‘Well, I suppose,’ Sandro mumbled, ‘I suppose so, I haven’t thought about it. And she’s no children, has she? Who gets it if –?’ He stopped.

  A small noise, a sigh, a clearing of the throat. ‘She might leave it to her half-brother, although he’s older than her so …’ A sigh again. ‘Or the husband, wherever he is. Anyway. Maybe it’s just Enrico gossiping. You know he’s obsessed with money.’

  Sandro said nothing, thinking only dully that she was probably right. None of this amounted to a motive for luring Johanna Nielsson back here and murdering her and an old butcher, or not yet.

  ‘I’ll leave something out for you,’ Luisa ventured into the silence. ‘A bit of soup?’

  ‘Oh, don’t worry,’ he said quickly, and regretted it imme
diately. ‘I mean, I don’t know when I’ll be in – only if it’s no trouble.’

  ‘It’s no trouble, sweetheart,’ she said.

  How could he tell her, after all this time? He couldn’t. Wasn’t coming back here enough?

  Pietro was standing with his back to him, looking up at the windows and the half-collapsed roof. The chimney halfway along the end of the house facing up the valley, there where the fireplaces must be. The kitchen below it which would have had a chimney corner for grilling and above it a fireplace in the coldest bedroom. Sandro stepped away from the car and back towards the house. He felt lighter, suddenly, or at least emptier.

  ‘There’s something,’ he said, pausing beside Pietro, nodding towards the house. ‘Just one more thing.’

  Chapter Fourteen

  BY THE TIME THEY got to Martinelli’s it was quite dark, and they had had to brush down the plaster dust from their clothes before they climbed the unlit path up the hillside to her front door. A yellow light shone under the scrawny trees and from behind one shuttered window.

  It was seven thirty. They’d been at La Vipera an hour and a half.

  ‘Do you think Marte was telling the truth about the princess being out?’ said Sandro.

  Pietro shrugged. ‘It’s far too late to call on her now, anyway,’ he said cheerfully.

  ‘But we will talk to her. Right?’ said Sandro. He didn’t want anyone, not even Pietro and certainly not Frollini, suggesting that they might bow to the desire of the nobility to be kept out of any dirty business on the borders of their land.

  ‘Sure,’ said Piero. He’d cheered up, which soothed Sandro. He didn’t like Pietro itchy. ‘And we’ll get forensics up here first thing. I mean,’ he pondered, ‘that thing. In the fireplace. It’s almost certainly just … nothing – dead bird, whatever – and too late to call them out now, but to be on the safe side.’

  A blocked up chimney breast concealing nothing more than a little pile of ancient cinders.

  Sandro nodded. It seemed like a strange dream now they were on their way back to civilisation, and it gave Sandro a shiver. Something had sent him back inside the building, something he didn’t quite understand, except that in that upstairs room there had been a fireplace forty years ago, he remembered it distinctly, an upstairs fireplace, and now there was none. So back in they’d gone.

  Using a crowbar Sandro kept in the boot of the car, with a shared sense of transgression – Pietro stopping, rubbing his head, expressing anxiety at regular intervals – they had managed to open a hole in the plaster about the size of a football. Big enough to shine the torch through, the UV torch that showed black where blood had been, black fading to grey as it aged. They’d both leaned abruptly forwards, because blood there had been, a stain on the brick of a hearth. The beam of the torch moving, picking up a filament of dusty cobweb.

  ‘Dead bird,’ Pietro had said, after a long moment in which he looked intently, then handed the torch to Sandro. Because that was what became clear, the dessicated splay of a wing half-glued to the brick by putrescence, on the edge of the dark splash. Dust and bird bones and shards of pottery – tiles or a chimney pot.

  A dead bird.

  They climbed now. The ground under the trees was littered with junk: an old chest freezer, the rusting shell of a car. Martinelli was single – a widow – and Sandro told himself she had no one to help her with the place. Or tell her what to do. With trepidation, the image in his head of the stern broad face with its blunt fringe, Sandro stood back and let Pietro ring the bell.

  ‘Who talked to her last time?’

  ‘Me and Panayotis,’ said Pietro. ‘She came into the station. And answered everything we asked her but, somehow, we came out of it none the wiser. She found the bodies, recognised the bodies, was here the whole summer and saw nothing.’

  They waited, and finally the door opened. Maria Clara Martinelli seemed quite unsurprised to see them. She accepted the explanation for Sandro’s presence as a plain-clothes colleague and stepped back to admit them without objection. When they followed her inside, Sandro could see why it had taken her so long to answer the door: it looked as though she was in line for a hip operation. She walked with a roll, like an old sailor in her wide jeans and sweater.

  The house was like a Swiss chalet inside – grubby red-andwhite gingham and hearts cut into wooden cupboards – and on every surface a cat. Two sat contented over folded paws on a large elderly sofa that had been laid with newspapers. Martinelli shooed them off fondly and began to remove the papers. One was the front page of a recent copy of La Nazione, covered with a large photograph of La Vipera.

  ‘Sit,’ she said and rolled off behind a breakfast bar in search of something. Sandro sat, watching Pietro gingerly follow suit, mouthing, sorry. Sandro just shrugged: what had he to be sorry about? To his abrupt surprise Sandro felt at home here. He found himself liking the woman with her square red face and her gruff manner. He liked her crowded, untidy warm house; he even liked her cats, although he could feel a sneeze coming on.

  She came back with a bottle of walnut amaro and three tiny glasses. Sandro saw Pietro grimace, but they all accepted a dose of the treacly black stuff. She seemed to know that this was all rather unorthodox – two policemen out of uniform, still lightly speckled with plaster dust – and to be supremely unbothered by the fact. Keen, indeed, to compound the unofficial nature of the visit by offering them alcoholic drinks.

  He had always found nocino, the liqueur, very unpalatable, like cough syrup, and perhaps that was just as well as he had to drive home. He raised the glass. ‘Salute!’ and took a sip, feeling suddenly, ridiculously cheerful. Pietro murmured something before replacing his glass on the coffee table between them.

  There was an element of hysteria – Sandro was aware of that. But if anything was an antidote to La Vipera, damp, cold, smelling of ancient weed and incense and shadowy with ghosts, this place was it.

  ‘Have you been alone long, Signora Martinelli?’ he asked, the treacle-bitterness of the amaro on his tongue. It wasn’t, actually, as bad as he remembered it. ‘I know you are a widow. This place is a lot to manage, isn’t it?’

  ‘Oh, twenty years,’ she said, eyeing him almost with amusement. ‘But we help each other out here. And work –’ she paused, and he thought she knew everything about him as she looked, this stout old woman in her man’s clothes, knew how many afternoons he had spent twiddling his thumbs since work, actual work, had kicked him out ‘– work’s good for the soul.’ She smiled a broad smile, the tiny glass still untouched between her rough old fingers.

  ‘It is,’ said Sandro. There was a silence. Pietro looked at him as if he was beginning to regret this whole business.

  Sandro sighed, the need to ask the questions weighing on him suddenly. ‘You were born here,’ he said.

  She nodded. ‘And I was here when they arrived, Miss Nielsson and her merry band.’

  ‘How –?’ Sandro paused, delicate suddenly.

  ‘How old was I?’ Her smile was still broad, a woman entirely lacking in vanity or dissimulation, but there was something, the merest shadow of something. Who didn’t feel it when considering their younger selves? Weariness. Something like that.

  ‘Twenty-two,’ said Maria Clara Martinelli, ‘if you mean when they arrived. Twenty-four by the time they left.’ She was one year younger than him.

  ‘I remember you,’ said Sandro and her eyes, which he noticed only then were blue, turned darker. ‘From the bar.’ She nodded slightly, and he knew she remembered him, too, if not before, then now.

  ‘Well,’ she said, ‘I suppose that’s your job.’

  When they’d gone in there on their way to the first call-out forty years ago, Baratti had thrown his weight around and got nowhere, asking who’d used the phone. ‘Safe to say there was no love lost,’ he said, remembering what Martine Kaufmann had said about Nielsson calling the barman a eunuch, ‘between the bar staff and La Vipera?’

  She shrugged, eyeing him. He raised th
e little glass to his lips but to his surprise he found it was empty. He set it down carefully on the low table and a cat appeared by his hand, rubbing against his wrist. He patted it, forgetting that cats didn’t like that, and it writhed out from under his hand and was gone.

  Maria Clara Martinelli seemed entirely relaxed. ‘I’m the only one left alive,’ she said. ‘A new guy runs the bar now.’ She smiled. ‘If you’re looking for suspects.’

  ‘It must have been a shock,’ Sandro said, ‘finding the bodies.’ She looked down at her hands, her glass still full, then up again, and he could see only frankness in her gaze. ‘I’ve seen dead things many times,’ she said. ‘The woods are full of dead things. Obviously a human being is different –’ She hesitated. ‘But – can I be honest with you?’

  ‘Of course,’ put in Pietro, eager, and they both looked at him.

  ‘Johanna Nielsson never struck me as much of a human being. Between us. That is a shocking thing to say. That some humans are better than others? Maybe. I didn’t like her. I thought she was immoral. Another thing we don’t say.’

  ‘Immoral,’ murmured Pietro, turning the word over. He was beginning to enjoy this too, Sandro could tell. Maria Clara Martinelli took up the bottle and leaned over their glasses. Pietro had finished his too. An inquiring look: Pietro hastily covered his glass with his hand but Sandro nodded.

  ‘So when you found her dead you were –?’

  ‘Well, we could say, I wasn’t surprised to find her murdered, even after all this time.’

  ‘Because she was immoral?’

  ‘Because she aroused strong feelings in people. Because she didn’t care.’ Was it his imagination or did her eyes slide over Sandro as she said it? He took a sip and grimaced.

  ‘And what about Giancarlo Lotti?’ he said, sliding in the question. ‘That was a shock for you. You must have known him your whole life.’ Mildly.

  She shrugged. ‘We bought our meat in the next village,’ she said.

  ‘Had you had a disagreement with him?’ Again she shrugged. ‘Miss Marte says you had.’