The Viper Read online

  A recent appointment, a replacement, Pietro had told Sandro, for that arsehole Scacchi who had accepted Sandro’s resignation from the force with total indifference all those years back. A real new broom, Pietro had said, with a sidelong look whose significance became clear only as the door opened. Manzoni was a woman: a tall, dry, pale woman with a level gaze.

  ‘Superintendente,’ Pietro began, ‘this is –’

  She put out her hand to shake Sandro’s, saying drily, ‘Your reputation precedes you, Mr Cellini.’

  ‘Oh, dear,’ he said, and was rewarded with the briefest ghost of a smile, then that was it.

  He didn’t look at Pietro: the bastard. Had he thought Sandro would say no if he’d known the new boss was female? He’d have been wrong. But she was speaking.

  ‘For your benefit, Mr Cellini,’ she said. ‘That’s why we’re here.’ Sandro inclined his head and she went on. ‘The victims died approximately a month apart. The female victim, whom tentative identification by the woman who discovered her suggests may be Johanna Nielsson –’

  Sandro raised a finger. ‘Hold on,’ he said. ‘If I may. Tentative identification?’ Manzoni’s head was on one side, waiting. ‘We’re talking about a body unprotected for a month at least, during the summer. A woman who hadn’t been seen in the area for forty years. What was it that suggested her identity to this – this Martinelli?’

  ‘The woman’s body had a tattoo,’ said Manzoni, brusque, and then he did remember. A tiny curled figure, like a snail, as Johanna Nielsson held out her hand to shake his.

  ‘I see,’ he said. ‘Yes.’ Had Sandro ever seen a tattoo on a woman before, at the age of twenty-three back in the seventies? He had not. He had seen them on men, and many since, on the living and on the dead of both sexes: they were useful for identification. He’d marvelled at them on the beach that summer; he’d said to Luisa, these children, inking their flesh with strange and marvellous designs, they never think they’ll get old and the flesh will sag. They think they’ll live forever. But back then – the snail on the inside of Johanna Nielsson’s wrist was the first one he’d seen on a young woman.

  Yes. He remembered Nielsson’s tattoo.

  ‘So Martinelli had dealings with her forty years ago.’ Sandro searched his memory for the stocky woman with her iron-grey fringe, trying to imagine her younger. Something flickered, but he couldn’t pin it down.

  ‘It would appear so.’ Manzoni still spoke easily but Sandro detected the faintest trace of impatience. ‘She wasn’t forthcoming in the initial statement, only said that she had worked in the village bar back then and served Nielsson on occasion. That tattoos weren’t common in those days.’ She smiled. ‘Does that answer your question?’

  Sandro nodded. ‘Please,’ he said. ‘Go on.’

  ‘Preliminary findings suggest cause of death in the female to be knife wounds to the lower body, most significantly the severing of the femoral artery, although there were more than twenty other wounds. Bound ante mortem to a chair with some kind of plastic ties still in situ – and, yes, we’re working on a source for those, possibly agricultural – stab wounds to the abdomen with a sharp short-bladed knife and had been dead just over a month when the bodies were found. The male – a local butcher, Giancarlo Lotti, and his dog, a truffle hound known as Gelsomina – had been dead only between two and three days. No one had reported him missing.’

  The photographs were just far enough from where Sandro sat to be out of focus. He kept it that way.

  ‘This is to be your investigation,’ said Manzoni, looking from one of them to the next, resting a beat on each, perhaps a beat and a half on Sandro, finishing on Pietro. ‘As you know, there is a major administrative and disciplinary recalibration under way here’ – hirings and firings, thought Sandro, still relaxed because it wasn’t anything to do with him any more – ‘which will require my attention, although homicide, and violence in general, against both men and women, is never,’ the superintendent paused, ‘never going to come second to bureaucracy on my watch.’

  There was a general murmuring of sheepish agreement, but she was still talking. ‘There’s been preliminary door to door in the village: Commissario Cavallaro and the agents have already covered some significant ground –’ A minute hesitation in which Sandro understood that no one had told them a blind thing and most of the doors had been kept firmly closed. ‘And they will bring you up to date on their findings so far.’ And then she paused. ‘Before I leave you, these are our questions.’ She held up a finger. ‘First, if this is Johanna Nielsson, what was she doing back here after what appears to be a significant absence? Second, is there a link between these two victims, and if so, what is that link? Your own historic connection with this case, Mr Cellini,’ nodding, ‘will be invaluable in answering these questions. The killing may have nothing to do with the commune or it may have everything to do with it, but I want anyone connected with La Vipera back then who’s still alive to be traced and interviewed, and I want you to do it.’

  Sandro nodded, his heart slowing, slowing. He focused on his clasped fingers in his lap and she went on.

  ‘And lastly, if, as we must assume, these killings are connected, why was there a month between them?’

  There was a pause, and heads turned to Sandro, who said, ‘But he didn’t kill her,’ pausing a beat, ‘and then come back a month later, wracked with remorse, to plead with her corpse for forgiveness then kill himself out of unassuaged guilt.’ They all stared at him.

  Manzoni was examining him, head tilted. ‘Because?’ she said.

  ‘Because you wouldn’t have needed to involve me if it was that easy, would you?’ said Sandro, and he got to his feet.

  He took a step, then another, past her, towards the photographs on the whiteboard.

  *

  The long blue bus pulled up in the tiny triangular piazza of Sant’Anna in Chianti and Luisa, who had been standing impatiently in the aisle for several minutes, climbed off, nodding to the bus driver behind his mirrored sunglasses so he’d think she was just another old lady with a shopping bag.

  There was an app, these days, that told you everything – timetables, bus stops, walking distances – and Luisa had that app, extolled its virtues to Sandro, chided him for being a fuddy-duddy when he expressed scepticism, but under most circumstances she too would still rather ask a human being. Today, though, she didn’t want anyone knowing her destination – or asking questions. Like, what do you think you’re doing?

  Sandro didn’t know she was coming here, to Sant’Anna. Sandro had gone in to the police station.

  Luisa had seen that piece in the paper before Pietro had come in with it, and said nothing. She was fairly sure Sandro had no clue that she remembered that case, that time long ago – and that woman, that woman Johanna Nielsson – rather well. And what Luisa was doing here, in answer to the question, was she was curious. There’d been a time she’d wanted Johanna Nielsson dead herself because the foreign woman had taken Sandro as her lover.

  Turning in the little square to decide her next move, the image of Giuli was there behind her eyes, glaring in her face. Never! The girl idolised Sandro. Giuli jutting out her chin and saying, But how do you know?

  You just know.

  She didn’t know how casual or fleeting or forgettable it had been on the woman’s part – Luisa had only had one lover; maybe you forgot easily if you’d had a hundred – because it had never, ever been acknowledged between them, but Luisa knew. And she knew Sandro hadn’t forgotten Johanna Nielsson.

  Pietro snaps his fingers and Sandro jumps. Was that it? Or was it her? The tall, fair foreign woman. Even dead, she could draw Sandro in, even after all this time.

  Luisa had said none of it. Partly out of pragmatism because it had been a slow year in the private detection business and Luisa had stopped work herself after a lifetime at Frollini, the haberdasher turned ladieswear turned ‘multibrand boutique’ whose relentless march had left her behind at last, weary. Partly becaus
e it was not, in the end, her decision to make. And partly, mostly, because she didn’t quite trust herself on this particular subject, this particular case.

  You didn’t forget, did you? You never forgot a woman who could take your man with a single look from those pale eyes: Johanna Nielsson.

  So she had let him pace up and down in the kitchen without saying anything, she had asked him what he wanted for dinner, she had kissed him on the cheek when he left, smiled when he looked back anxiously at the bend in the stairs. And when he’d gone, Luisa, with time on her hands these days, had got her handbag and looked at the app and bought a bus ticket.

  Luisa could have stayed on at Frollini; offers had been made, kindly, by the owner, part-time or working in the huge outlet in the countryside five miles or so from where she stood, but even leaving out the little matter of breast cancer – six years down the line and off their books if not in the clear in her own head – Luisa was running out of the patience required to be a thoughtful, discriminating vendeuse, and they both knew it.

  Luisa stood a moment in the dim little piazza, feeling a warm gust as a solitary truck trundled by: was it gossip she was after? Early afternoon and there was no one to be seen, life not quite back to normal after a long hot summer and a week of storms – but it was more than that. The bus driver had nodded when she had asked him if it was the right stop for her destination, nodded again, and she could see his eyebrows lifting behind the mirrored lenses at the mention of the name. La Vipera.

  Forty years ago Luisa and Sandro had been out walking along the river to Settignano, the day after he’d been out to La Vipera. The night before he hadn’t called, which even at that early stage in their relationship had been unusual. He had called her at work the following lunchtime to ask if she would like to go for a walk. ‘Not the movies,’ he’d said, ‘not tonight.’

  She remembered it all, as if she’d known from the beginning there was something about this place, these people, that was going to stir up the mud, the riverbed of their lives. She even remembered his face, gazing across the Arno at something she couldn’t discern. ‘They were – educated people,’ he had told her, disbelieving. ‘And not all foreigners, either. She was –’ and she’d known then, with the pause. ‘But the place – the kitchen was such a – such a mess. The disorder.’

  They both came from quite ordinary backgrounds, she and Sandro, with mothers who scrubbed their kitchen floors twice daily. This door to La Vipera’s kitchen opened on another world whose boundary they couldn’t discern. ‘She’s from one of those northern countries, Denmark,’ he’d told her, frowning. ‘Maybe it’s different there.’

  ‘Maybe,’ Luisa had said drily.

  Their relationship up until that point had been circumspect. Introduced by her friend Livia, at some parade or other, whispering in her ear, He’s a police cadet, as he marched beside them, head up. It was what she loved about him, his seriousness – even at twenty-three, the frown that would come over him when something he didn’t understand cropped up, as he tried to work it out. Sandro had never been one to jump to conclusions: his livelier, louder colleagues laughed at him for it. Changing their tune to grudging respect as he turned out so often to be right.

  He had looked at her, in the warm evening by the river, holding her hand tight still. ‘You don’t understand,’ he said slowly.

  She’d stayed silent, bridling, until she could trust herself to say, ‘Maybe not.’

  He told Luisa her name only later, Johanna Nielsson, casually. The case had taken up three weeks of investigation and she knew La Vipera had been on the radar for a time after, but Sandro hadn’t really talked about her again. Luisa knew, though, that he thought about her. The foreign woman glittered in his imagination, like the fireflies in the trees around the city on warm dark evenings.

  Luisa took a deep breath and walked into the bar. Eleven o’clock in the morning. A handful of men were standing at the far end, drinking white wine: they didn’t seem to notice her. However discreet a presence Sandro could make himself, a woman in late middle age carrying a shopping bag was invisible. She asked for a coffee in her meekest voice, selected a pastry from the cabinet and turned to find a seat. She saw that one of the men was, in fact, a woman, stocky, dressed in jeans and workman’s jacket, but with an unmistakable bosom.

  They muttered, with occasional outbursts of laughter. The barman was summoned for a refill and discreetly she moved her chair. The mannish woman was in conversation principally with a lean iron-haired man. Then things sobered: they were talking about someone called Gelsomina – there appeared to have been three bodies found, not two. The woman was quite exercised about this death and Luisa couldn’t work it out, why Sandro hadn’t been told, why it hadn’t been in the papers, until she realised Gelsomina was a dog. ‘I can see about the other two but why punish the dog?’

  Discreetly, Luisa shifted so she could get a better look at the speaker. With a shock of recognition she realised Sandro had shown her the picture of a younger version, uncomfortably skirted at a wedding or something like it, of the stocky woman. She was Maria Clara Martinelli, who’d found the bodies. As Luisa watched, the tall silver-haired man clapped her on the shoulder, heartily, country people together, with no pretensions, no nice manners. But he didn’t have quite the right look for a farmer: lean and pale, with high cheekbones. More of a monk.

  Luisa took a bite of her pastry and found it so disappointing she almost tutted out loud. Thick and greasy, it stuck stubbornly to the roof of her mouth; she took another bite to be polite and pushed it away. The coffee was good.

  Did country people rank the death of a dog higher than those of two human beings? Not unless they had a fairly low opinion of the human beings in question. Luisa remembered reading that Martinelli was a widow: she looked as though she worked hard, which was the widow’s lot. Another man, a barfly with a red face and bloodshot eyes, was gesturing for a third round of drinks. Martinelli was shaking her head.

  The bodies. A butcher and a Danish heiress, a stolid working man and a wild child from the seventies. She would have been twenty-eight when she set up at La Vipera with her lover, a good-looking heroin addict from the wealthy industrial north, Marcantonio Gorgone. Did Sandro know how much Luisa knew about the case? What an interest she had taken behind his back, all those years ago? Luisa had only met Nielsson but once, and Sandro had known nothing of that meeting. Only once, but once had been enough.

  If Luisa closed her eyes she would be able to see Johanna Nielsson as she had been, her tall body made out of straight lines and angles, long, slender thighs, pale straight hair, a level grey gaze. Wearing a long dress of pleats and folds, embroidered at the neck, something from a distant continent, India or South America. Flat-chested as a boy. Luisa put a hand to her remaining breast reflexively, to feel its weight, but stopped herself for fear they would see the movement from where they stood at the bar and wonder what on earth. Luisa had always been small, round hipped, narrow shouldered, but she had been proud of her bosom back then, getting to her feet, standing up straight when she had seen Johanna Nielsson approaching, though still a head shorter.

  She’d come with a few of her gang. From where Luisa had sat, in the early evening that long-ago summer, on the ledge running along the back of the Loggia dei Lanzi, half-hidden by Perseus holding up the Medusa’s head, she had watched them approach, Nielsson spearheading. A small blonde, a dark Italianlooking girl, the man, Gorgone. They stopped at the foot of the few steps up to the loggia and standing, moving forward, she had heard them speak. Nielsson had touched each of them lightly on the shoulder, like a blessing, and off they went, trooping away down the great flank of the Palazzo Vecchio.

  And now, in the dim little café with the taste of the bun’s cheap shortening in her mouth, Luisa wondered if any of Nielsson’s ménage might still be around. They might be living in those woods or gone underground, changed beyond recognition in the intervening years, greying or sober or simply silent. The idea was fanciful: the
locals wouldn’t have assimilated them and no one could live on chestnuts and roadkill for forty years.

  Maria Clara Martinelli was making her move. Luisa waited two minutes, then followed.

  Chapter Three

  SKIRTING THE BIG OLD WALL of the city under the speckled trunks of plane trees, Giulietta Sarto – Giuli to everyone but the authorities – could smell the autumn. Exhaust fumes and woodsmoke and the drift of leaves damp in the gutters – and another year gone. Another winter waiting. Giuli most decidedly did not like getting old.

  Ten in the morning – well, she would be at work for 10.04; Sandro wouldn’t be bothered anyhow but Sandro wasn’t there this morning to be bothered – and Giuli was already tired. For a month now, maybe more, she had been starting awake at five, five thirty, the metallic taste of fear in her mouth and thumping panic in her chest, while beside her on the pillow Enzo still slept peaceably, the sleep of the just. By lunchtime she would be yawning.

  Was forty-five old? Not to some, not to most, she was prepared to concede that. But Giuli, anorexic at fourteen, drug addicted by fifteen, on the streets for the twenty years following, had never expected to have to worry about old age. Her own mother had died at forty-two, looking seventy. Giuli paused, stooped to examine her reflection in the wing mirror of a parked car. Grimaced at her pallor, frowned at the bags under her eyes. Was there something different, something new? She’d never been vain, was more one to avoid her own face in the mirror once the obligatory eyeliner had been applied, but she thought she looked puffy and ill.

  She straightened and plodded on, shouldering her bag with a hand to her nose: the diesel fumes this morning felt like they were choking her, turning her stomach.

  Some people – Sandro and she – were born old, born sceptical about the future, born looking for what would go wrong, not looking forward. Giuli had thought that would protect her, perhaps. She’d never had any expectations – there always seemed more urgent things to worry about than a thickening waistline or aches and pains or losing her marbles.