The Viper Read online

  Once or twice in the last few weeks she had tried to start the conversation with Enzo and changed her mind. They had barely been married a year, after all – there was no need to start talking about her little worries. Will you still love me if I turn into a nonna-type, round as a barrel and only interested in what’s for dinner and putting my feet up in front of the TV? He’d married whippety, nervy, spiky-purple-haired Giuli. She needed to get her roots done, but she was too tired.

  Sometimes it pissed her off deeply to be female. Every five minutes a different set of hoops to jump through. Periods. Boobs – or not, in her case. Motherhood – or not, in her case. Then suddenly you get a hair sprouting on your chin and you feel the urge to rant ten times a day and it’s all over, boom, menopause. Now you’re an old lady, next stop oblivion. Giuli stopped at the lights, cars roaring past, other people going somewhere while she, she was only –

  Hungry.

  Giuli diverted. She crossed the road, turned into the Piazza Tasso and there it was again, the comforting whiff of buns – she could almost see them, a tray of pastries smelling of vanilla and butter, a golden crust of sugar on top. Her stomach growled: perhaps that was her problem. She was only hungry.

  Sandro’s office – Sandro Cellini, Private Investigator, he’d grumbled over the cost of the brass plaque but six years on he was still in business – was in sight, but she turned the other way into the bar, Le Tramway, following her nose. A plate, a napkin, a briosc alla crema, make that two. Giuli munched, contented, leaning against the bar, catching sight of herself in the pink-tinged mirroring behind the array of bottles. She had cheeks, pouchy little hamster cheeks – maybe that was what was different. She chewed, swallowed, set the bun down a second, discontented, then picked it up again, but it wasn’t the same.

  What woke Giulietta Sarto up in the morning was fear of death. Which was also new. When she woke she knew she would die, for certain: it wasn’t that alone, exactly, that was new – she’d lived most of her youth not expecting to wake up at all. Now she felt it, in her body, in her ageing, dying, changing cells, in the difference, the new taste in her mouth. The most significant difference was that these days she passionately, fervently, with every one of those mutating cells, did not want to die.

  Something wrong with her kidneys? That puffed you up, she’d seen it. Addicts often ended with the organs packing up, one after the other.

  Giuli paid and left, her stomach full and churning. Across the piazza was the scruffy exterior of her old place of work, even if part-time: the women’s centre, with the usual crew of restless, reluctant dads and chain-smoking women patrolling the pavement outside it. If she had still been there, she could have wandered down one of the corridors and collared a trauma doctor or gynae, a rehab worker, an addiction counsellor, even the STD crew at a pinch – more or less anyone would do given the range of Giuli’s misdemeanours. She could casually mention – asking for a friend – her history, her symptoms: the palpitations, breathlessness, nausea, panic, tiredness, mood swings. Extreme bloody tiredness.

  But Giuli didn’t work there any more. And she was too tired to lift up the phone and ask for an appointment.

  She could hear it ringing upstairs from the pavement, her key in the door. She couldn’t have hurried if her life depended on it but as luck – or not – would have it, the phone was still ringing when she let herself in to the first-floor office.

  ‘Hello?’

  At first she thought they’d hung up, and all she could hear was background noise or the sound of her own blood rushing, but then it took shape, it became the sound of someone sobbing quietly.

  ‘Hello?’ And at last it came.

  A tiny voice, tiny. ‘Help me,’ it said. ‘Please help me.’ And the line went dead.

  *

  Sandro didn’t look at the photographs. Not yet. He stood in front of the names.

  They must have got them from the old case files. Names, dates and places of birth. That had been Sandro’s job, getting their documents from them, out of hippy backpacks and greasy bright-coloured Indian trousers, writing it all down, and there they were after all these years. They milled around him, ghostly, drifting from La Vipera’s kitchen into the old hallway, the man with his curls and his faraway look, the small blonde watching him from the doorway, their voices calling up the stairs.

  Johanna Nielsson, b. 1949 Copenhagen

  Marcantonio Gorgone, b. 1951 Reggio-Emilia

  Martine Kaufmann, b. 1956 Regensburg

  Lucia Grenzi, b. 1955 Trentino

  Helen Mason, b. 1947 Montreal

  Chantal Buisson, b. 1939 Toulouse

  Behind him now Manzoni was saying something about identification and dental records, but it was as if she was a long way off or he was underwater. He took a step to one side and he was in front of the crime scene pictures.

  A dirt floor, sticks and leaves, a humped shape that could be a pile of old clothes against a chair but for the hair. Coarse greying hair, scurf on the collar of a padded greenish jacket of the sort countrymen and hunters wore. Then the dog, half under its owner, a black and white spaniel of some kind – although Sandro knew nothing about dogs – its head tipped back at an odd angle, neck broken. Teeth bared. On the soil floor of the hut under the man’s outstretched hand – blunt-nailed, black hairs across his knuckles – was a knife, a hunting knife, the blade approximately six inches long and black with blood.

  ‘He might have killed her,’ Sandro said without turning round, ‘but as suicide methods go, stabbing yourself in the chest is fairly unusual.’ From behind him a murmur of agreement. ‘And a countryman doesn’t kill his dog like that. He’d have shot it and shot himself after. You wouldn’t care, you see, about the noise.’

  Belatedly Manzoni’s words caught up with him. Dental records: yes. For identifying her. Something about her having kept a low profile, out of touch with her family, a loner, a drifter. Johanna Nielsson, whose light eyes had rested on him in the green haze of an upper room in La Vipera forty years ago, of course she had drifted. That was what she’d been all about, no strings, no ties – he’d heard her say those words, explaining to the dimwitted policemen what their commune was for. And now without his volition his eyes drifted, finally, to rest on her. There, with the dead man’s head almost in her lap, she sat.

  What was left of her sat. On a wooden chair in the corner of the hut, her head tipping forward: she had been pinioned at the arms with plastic ties, faded blue, holding the body in position. The long hair. Long hair, the hair of a witch or a wise woman, long and dirty white, fell across her body: some of it had begun to shed, a hank halfway down her sleeve. It obscured some of her face but not enough: he could see the gleam of her teeth exposed by the puffing of the lips, white against dark stretched skin. Small and white and even.

  That mouth, her head thrown back and laughing at him by the long windows of La Vipera.

  In Sandro’s head began a kind of incantation, a child squeezing its eyes shut and chanting the stages of decomposition are … Are significantly dependent on temperature. It had not been an unusually hot summer but the temperature had remained above thirty-five for the whole of August and into September. He and Luisa had quarrelled over whether to go to the sea or the hills; they had sat holding hands in the brightly lit restaurant of a seaside hotel; they had made it up in the humid sea air, paddling at twilight. And all the time this had been happening. The processes of decomposition.

  In a corner of the hut what was left of Johanna Nielsson sat. The body was dressed in a long high-necked loose dress, antique in style, printed cotton that draped itself over the bloated limbs. A dark stain spread at its centre and there were brownish areas where decomposition had stuck to it, but the design was quite clearly discernible, tiny flowers, the kind of dress they used to laugh at, when fashionable forty years ago, a night gown for an old lady.

  Sandro’s hand was at his mouth, the edge of his index finger pressing up against the nostrils as if to block the smell that was not
in the room with them so much as buzzing in his ears, glittering behind his eyes.

  ‘You’re still not sure – of her identity?’ Sandro said, his voice coming out rough.

  ‘We’ve tracked down a relative in Denmark,’ said Manzoni, behind him. ‘They hadn’t seen her in years but provided a DNA sample. So we soon will be.’

  But Sandro knew. It was her. He turned.

  ‘So who do we have?’ he said.

  Chapter Four

  IT APPEARED THAT Maria Clara Martinelli lived at the top of the village, in a small untidy farmstead under sparse trees – an ancient tractor with weeds growing through it, a mildewed car and the smell of pigs.

  Martinelli and the lean man had come out of the bar and, after a nod, gone their separate ways.

  It had been a long walk uphill, and Luisa had had to leave plenty of space between herself and Martinelli, walking ahead – with an awkward rolling gait, but fast – in her man’s jacket and cap, allowing the other woman to disappear at regular intervals above her then hurrying in a panic to catch up, trying to muffle the sound of her footsteps on the verge. The village houses fell away abruptly and then it was all woodland. The leaves weren’t yet turning but a cool, damp smell drifted out, the mushroomy scent of wet leaves and trickling streams after the previous week’s rains.

  A pair of crumbling stone pillars flanking an ornate rusted gate came into view at one point, but Martinelli kept going up the road with her strange rolling walk. Luisa had turned to look at the gateway: an overgrown drive seemed to peter out beyond it, leading nowhere. Up ahead Martinelli had not broken stride.

  Luisa stood on the verge and wondered. Tried to visualise it: the discovery of the bodies somewhere above her. She had understood from what she had overheard in the bar that Martinelli and the lean, tall man with his hooded eyes had no doubt at all about the identities of the corpses she had found and harboured not an ounce of sorrow or pity for either death.

  And she wondered where Nielsson had been all these years.

  She had thought of her now and again, of course she had. This woman she’d met once, at twilight among the statues under the Loggia dei Lanzi, forty years ago. Luisa had heard about the disintegration of La Vipera two years after the investigation from Enrico Frollini, her erstwhile employer, or rather overheard. Gone: she remembered it as if it had been yesterday. She’s gone.

  Enrico – Mr Frollini to her back then, an inveterate gossip and social climber still – had been at the front desk, beside the silver-keyed cash till they would shortly trade in for an ugly modern one, leaning confidentially on his elbows. Christmas 1978. He had been talking to the Princess Salieri, chatelaine of the big villa above Sant’Anna, whose lands adjoined La Vipera and who had been waging her silent one-sided war on Nielsson since the Danish woman had, shortly after her arrival, without warning or consultation, paid for a wall to be built along their boundary – or at least that was why she said she hated the woman. The truth, Luisa suspected, had been more complicated.

  The princess, being like most of the nobility tight-fisted – or frugal, as they would prefer it – had bought nothing in the shop since 1974, but Frollini had generally been relaxed about that if she brought news instead. She ignored Luisa, largely, but was aware of her enough to turn her back and whisper now and again.

  ‘Gone, packed up overnight, men came in a pantechnicon with foreign writing on it – God knows, those languages, they’re barbaric, I don’t know where it was from – and good riddance.’ Stiff and angry.

  ‘Addirittura!’ Never! Frollini whispered avid encouragement, and Luisa could see Salieri now, sighing, setting her big old ugly Gucci portmanteau down on the counter. The princess would then have been something like forty-five. Luisa remembered Salieri searching in the bag, as big as a tool bag, for the Russian cigarettes she smoked, with gold tips, lighting up in the shop, as would have been quite normal in those days.

  She had had a husband, with an aristocratic speech impediment, who occasionally accompanied her to the shop, murmuring unintelligibly in the background as he caressed the gentlemen’s tweeds, but on this occasion he must have stayed behind, sighing at the windows of their handsome hill-top villa.

  That was where he had stood when Luisa had been summoned to the wedding of their daughter at the villa the year before, to assist in the dressing of half a dozen bridesmaids. The estate had been the size of a small hamlet, with its topiary and olive press and faded state rooms, and you could see a corner of La Vipera’s roof from those windows. Luisa knew that because when the bridesmaids had departed in their cloud of perfume and a chorus of high-pitched complaints she had gone to look. The red tiles of the roof and the line of the newly built wall were also visible here and there as a thinning of the trees, the occasional ugly clearing.

  And now, walking at a discreet distance behind Maria Clara Martinelli under low skies, Luisa glimpsed the Salieri place on the top of the far hillside, its imposing crenellated façade unchanged by forty years – or four hundred for that matter. She didn’t even know if the old woman, the princess, was still alive and kicking: she must be eighty-five if she was a day.

  Benedetta came in once or twice in the years after her marriage, always silent in her mother’s wake, submitting to garments being thrust at her, trying on without emerging from her cubicle. Not for a long time, but then some women stopped buying clothes once they hit the middle years.

  The softly murmuring Prince Salieri – he’d been much older – had died perhaps thirty years ago, not so long after the disbanding of the community at La Vipera and hastily, with a curious lack of fanfare, no displays of grief, public or private, but then it had probably been one of those marriages. The rich, as Luisa had often commented, aren’t like the rest of us. Up ahead, Martinelli turned off the road and let herself into a low cottage under the trees, on one side the vegetable patch and agricultural flotsam of a smallholding.

  La Vipera was around the next bend, perhaps half a mile on: Martinelli its neighbour on this side, the Salieri estate’s boundary curving around most of the rest. Luisa turned her head to look. The raw gashes in the forest made by the wall that Luisa had seen from the Salieri windows all that time ago had long since healed over. The wall was invisible from where she stood now: it might still be there, or it might be fallen.

  The countryside and its inhabitants had only ever to be patient and wait for the status quo to return. They generally didn’t go in for attention-grabbing killings to speed things up.

  From below in the village Luisa heard the buzz of a motorino winding up the hill towards her.

  She should leave.

  The knowledge came to her urgently. But it was already too late: Martinelli’s door banged abruptly open and the woman was striding down, heading right for her. The whine of the motorino was louder now. Luisa turned to look behind her but it was not yet visible, then she looked back at Maria Clara Martinelli. There was no mistaking the anger in her face.

  *

  ‘So,’ said Pietro, reaching for a plastic tray. He set it down on the shelf next to Sandro’s and they shuffled forwards. ‘What do you think?’

  They had convened to the cafeteria for lunch. Same old conveyor belt, side by side, same dull clatter, same glare of overhead lighting, same row of lunch ladies in their hairnets and white aprons.

  ‘She seems all right,’ he said, ‘Manzoni,’ and sighed, looking at a plate of tagliatelle with ragu before helping himself to one of the prepared salads covered in cling film. Luisa had him on a diet. Beside him, Pietro thoughtlessly accepted the pasta. They sat.

  So who have we got?

  When he had turned back to Manzoni she had been smiling, broadly. ‘A man after my own heart,’ she said. She wanted a list of suspects. ‘Based on whatever you want. Means, motive, opportunity and your own intuition: you don’t have to have all of them at once. Come on, lads. You know how it’s done.’

  Shaking salt over his tagliatelle, Pietro shrugged. ‘She’s all right,’ he said.
‘And like she said, she’s leaving us to it, which is the main thing.’

  ‘Nice lads, too,’ said Sandro eyeing his salad.

  Pietro nodded, his mouth already full.

  They’d been respectful. When the door had closed behind Manzoni, Pietro had taken the floor, the three young officers relaxed now but quiet. Seeing his old friend’s authority, how he had moved on since the old days, Sandro had wondered all over again what he needed an old lag like him for.

  ‘Cellini is here because he was in on the original investigation into La Vipera,’ Pietro had said, pacing, his eye on all of them. ‘I want you to liaise with both of us equally. He may be retired –’ the briefest pause here while Pietro wrestled (Sandro knew him so well) with the evasion, as they both knew Sandro had more or less been fired ‘– and he’s not going to be in the office much. But you should consider him to have the same authority in the investigation as I do.’

  Sandro, who had not blushed in twenty years, had felt a certain warmth at his collar and cleared his throat while Pietro went on. ‘I’d like you to bring him up to date on the work you’ve done so far.’

  Panayotis, the Greek, kicked off. Stolid, thorough, only a hint of an accent so he was probably born here, thought Sandro. ‘Forensics went over Lotti’s house with a fine toothcomb,’ he said. ‘Clean and cold as a morgue.’ He grunted. ‘Or a butcher’s shop. They say he had been dead more than two days, less than a week, but there was the rain –’ He broke off and Sandro nodded.

  Two days back. Routine these days, the storms that brought summer to an end: they seemed to be more violent than they’d ever been in Sandro’s childhood and this one had knocked tiles off the roof next to theirs and turned the river yellow. Any evidence on that hillside would have ended up in the Arno by now, tangled in one of the great bird’s nests of debris that the flooding river brought up against the bridges.