CHAPTER TWENTY

BY THE TIME LUISA walked back through her door on the Via dei Macci, it was dark outside.

Giuli had been making excuses for Luisa while they waited. ‘You know there’s hardly any phone coverage,’ she’d said. ‘Inside an apartment building, for example, or in a particular street. The Via dei Bardi, for example, that’s a killer. San Niccolo in general, tucked in under the hillside there …’

Sandro had let her talk, fretting silently, barely even picking up on her mention of San Niccolo and what an undesirable place it could be to live.

‘They’ll be fine,’ she had finished up, uncertainly.

‘So why didn’t she leave a note?’

‘You know Luisa,’ Giuli had said, and that was the end of that conversation.

And all Luisa had said when she did return was, ‘Don’t be daft. It’s a Thursday in August, there aren’t even any cars, what were you worried about? That I’d be run over by a watermelon seller?’

Giuli had stood there in that stance again, arms tightly folded against her body, and a frown etched on her face.

‘Not you too?’ said Luisa. ‘Come on.’

It was bravado, though. Sandro knew her too well.

‘It might be August,’ he said, ‘but people seem to still be getting murdered. For nothing, some of them.’

‘People?’ Luisa pulled out a chair and sat with weary resignation. Reluctantly, Giuli let her arms drop and sat down next to her. They looked at him warily.

Sandro wished he could take it back now. ‘Oh, nothing. A mugging, carjacking or something on the south side, Pietro mentioned it.’ Luisa nodded, her face betraying nothing.

‘Where’s Anna?’ asked Giuli.

‘She wanted to go home,’ said Luisa, then let out a dry, small laugh. ‘Home.’ She shook her head. ‘Poor kid. That dismal old place.’

‘It took three hours?’ said Sandro. ‘Just taking her over to Santo Spirito?’

‘Can you get me a glass of water?’ said Luisa mildly. ‘I’m parched.’

And she waited for him to turn his back, he knew, before she said, ‘We went over to the apartment in Firenze Sud. His apartment, supposedly, the one they were going to move into.’

‘All that way on the bus?’ Sandro set down the water and the glass. Sighed and poured.

Luisa’s mouth turned down, just a little. ‘I know,’ she said eventually. ‘Yes, I know. She wanted to go. She wanted to show it to me.’

‘Oh, I tried the estate agent,’ said Sandro, absently. Luisa looked at him. ‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘He wasn’t back from lunch, they said. Running late, they said he’d call me back. Galeotti. Go on.’

He visualized the man, his flash car. And clients like Marisa Goldman on his books, the agency’s letterhead on her desk at the bank. No wonder he didn’t have time for Sandro. Was Marisa Goldman moving house?

‘He never called, though.’

Luisa sighed.

‘Anyway,’ she said. ‘Giovanna Baldini – I told you about her, right? She was at school with me.’ Sandro nodded, waiting. ‘She lives in the flat above. We went in. We talked to her.’ Luisa took a sip of the water and mopped at her forehead, pale and damp with sweat. ‘She knew a bit about the flat – and – and in the end she got the concierge to talk to us.’

‘The drunk you talked about?’ said Sandro. ‘And?’

‘All right,’ she said. ‘So it turns out, the flat wasn’t his at all.’

Sandro looked at her and realized he had never really believed in Anna’s apartment with its nursery in the first place. What had he thought? That she’d imagined it? Or that her fiancé had? But it did exist.

‘No,’ he said. ‘So?’

‘So it’s been on the market, half furnished, in a terrible state, for years.’ She wrinkled her nose. ‘The builders had been sent in, just today.’

‘Sent in by whom?’ Sandro stared at her, trying to work it out. The timing. When had Josef taken Anna to see this flat?

‘The new owners.’ Luisa sighed. ‘It wasn’t easy. You don’t understand, getting information out of these people.’ She pursed her lips. ‘The concierge took twenty minutes of Giovanna bellowing through his keyhole to even come to the door, then he didn’t want us to come in.’ She shifted in her seat. ‘I thought poor Anna was going to throw up in there. I had to make her sit outside in the end.’

‘Is she all right?’ said Giuli. ‘Anna?’

Sandro saw Luisa’s expression, remorse and apprehension mingled. ‘I think so,’ she said wearily. ‘I tried to get her to come here, but she said home was the Loggiata, that’s where he’d come to find her. She’s stubborn.’

You’re all bloody stubborn, thought Sandro, looking from one woman to the other. ‘What did the concierge say?’

‘Well, he blustered,’ said Luisa. ‘I think he spends too much of the day out of it to know a lot. Said the agent had been round last week with two yuppie types. He didn’t know if they’d agreed a price. So we went up and tried to talk to the builders. Only they were Moroccan and none of us speaks French even, let alone the other language they were speaking.’

‘Berber,’ supplied Giuli. Sandro looked at her. ‘What?’ she said. ‘It’s one of the Moroccan languages. Hassan at the Montecarla, that bar, he speaks it.’ Sandro looked back at Luisa, outdone.

‘She’s an asset,’ said Luisa, smiling wearily at Giuli, who now almost blushed. At least, Sandro thought, it was a considerable improvement on the pallor she’d had since she turned up at the riverside bar. And why had she spent so much time in the bathroom?

‘Agreed,’ said Sandro, temporarily putting his anxiety about Giuli to one side. ‘So. The builders?’

‘And it turns out they got asked to do the work this weekend; the deal went through end of last week. That’s all the builders knew, but the yuppies put down a deposit in cash on Monday and they were in.’

Sandro sat. ‘The concierge,’ he said slowly. ‘You told me he was a drunk – but what kind was he? I mean, just a bit of a slob, or all day every day drunk? So he wouldn’t notice if Anna’s fiancé was squatting in one of his apartments?’

‘I talked to Giovanna about that,’ said Luisa. ‘He might be drunk – and she said he usually is out of it – but she’s sharp as a tack. Said she’d definitely have known if someone was living in the flat. But the heating and water were off, for a start. She grumbled about it because it meant she had to turn up the heating in her place to compensate over the winter. It wasn’t habitable.’ She sighed. ‘Giovanna walks past the door a couple of times a day, and she’d never seen Josef.’

But if there was one thing Sandro had learned about the man, he was good at keeping a low profile. It wasn’t easy to fall off the radar like that, just the one sighting. As far as they knew he’d broken cover just the once, at the Loggiata, trying to get to Anna? That told Sandro that he was desperate, and scared. Where had he been hiding?

‘You showed her a picture?’

‘Anna had her phone,’ said Luisa, rubbing her eyes. ‘She showed Giovanna.’ Her voice was muffled.

She raised her head, and looked so tired Sandro said gently, ‘All right, angel. You need some rest.’

‘It’s not much of a mugshot,’ said Luisa, ignoring him. ‘But Giovanna was pretty certain. She told Anna off for losing weight since the picture, so she could tell that much.’

‘She has lost weight,’ Giuli put in, frowning. ‘Off her face, for sure.’

Patiently Sandro looked at the two of them, and waited for them to return to the point.

‘So he wasn’t living there,’ he prompted eventually. ‘But he got the keys – from somewhere, for at least two visits, with Anna, maybe more.’

They looked at him, and Sandro got up and went to the window, pushing back the shutters. They thought it was hot inside, but the air that entered was as humid, hot and stagnant as if he’d opened the door on a Turkish bath.

‘Who owned the place, then? Who sold it to the yuppies?’ He looked down along the dirty street, where the lights were beginning to blink yellow. They were beginning to congregate, on the corner: three dreadlocked kids, one dog. As he watched, one of them dropped a can to the pavement and stamped on it with a crack. Not too many yuppies here.

‘Some old couple, years back,’ Luisa said promptly. ‘Bought as an investment, hardly lived in recently, she’s widowed.’

She was watching him. For a moment, the pale, attentive oval of her face looked like a painting to Sandro in the circle of light falling from the wide, low shade.

‘Can’t see an old couple being anything but suspicious of a young Roma,’ he said thoughtfully. Thinking of the old lady at the Loggiata. Reading his mind, Giuli grunted agreement. ‘So how’d he get the keys?’ said Sandro.

‘The keys,’ said Luisa, sitting up straighter, a hand on the table and tapping as she did when she was thinking hard. ‘They were what worried her. Worried Anna. They were wrong.’

‘Maybe he stole them,’ said Giuli.

‘Maybe they were lent to him,’ said Luisa thoughtfully.

Sandro crossed from the window and leaned down over the table, feeling something take shape.

‘By the owner?’

Luisa shook her head slowly. ‘The keys he had weren’t the owners’ set, were they? A Ferrari keyfob? For an old widow?’

Sandro thought of Galeotti showing them round the flat in San Niccolo. His personalized number plate. His Maserati.

Giuli butted in. ‘I’ve heard stories,’ she said.

‘Stories?’ said Sandro.

‘Stories about estate agents,’ she said. ‘And what they get up to in those empty apartments they’re selling.’

‘Yes,’ said Sandro, more tetchily than he meant. ‘We’ve all heard those stories. But what’s the connection with Josef? Where’s he been hiding? And what has he done?’

*

Bitch, thought Roxana, following her superior’s customized Cinquecento – stripes from end to end, red on white – through the automatic gate. Where did Marisa Goldman get off? Bitch.

It had had Val shaking his head all over again; Marisa was a weird one, all right. It was as if she had no need to make people like her, she was above all that. Even if Maria Grazia was right and she wasn’t as wealthy as she wanted people to think, she certainly acted like it. Entitled, that was the word for the way Marisa acted.

And here was Roxana, doing her a favour, regardless.

‘No,’ Marisa had said, watching Roxana and Val.

‘But it’s him,’ Roxana had said.

‘Yeah, it is,’ Val had said, looking at Marisa curiously. ‘It’s Gio. Josef, from the Carnevale.’

Roxana had felt her brain whir as she said it. I knew it, a small voice was insisting, I knew there was a connection. But the rest of it was just crazy static. It didn’t make sense.

‘Seems like it,’ Val had said. He had shrugged. ‘Weird, huh?’ Giving every impression of not understanding the weirdness of it at all.

‘We should call him,’ Roxana had said decisively, and that was when Marisa had been galvanized into action. ‘Cellini. I have his number somewhere.’

‘No,’ she’d said. ‘No way, not on company time, not on company phones.’

‘But it’s him,’ Roxana had said.

‘You didn’t recognize him?’ Val had been looking curiously at Marisa.

Marisa’s jaw had set. ‘A guy from the porn cinema,’ she had said, her voice flat and cold, not even a raised eyebrow.

‘I didn’t mean—’ Val had looked alarmed. ‘No, I just meant, he’s in once a week, you must have seen him.’

‘I don’t give a damn,’ she had said. ‘He could be Il Cavaliere, Berlusconi, for all I care. I’ve given that detective enough of my time; I told him I might have seen him in with Claudio. Is it going to help the bank, looking for this – this guy? No.’

‘He was pretending to be Claudio,’ Roxana had said, to herself, her eyes on the picture. There was something about it – so cheap, so poorly reproduced – that had made her sorry. The girl’s face, she looked so happy hanging on to this – fake. Pretending to be Claudio? It didn’t make sense.

‘I guess maybe it’s this girl that’s looking for him,’ she had said slowly. ‘Although he didn’t say it. Sandro Cellini.’ She felt in her jacket pocket: was that where she’d put his card?

Staring each other down like cat and dog, Marisa and Val had paid her no attention.

‘All right,’ Roxana had said. ‘I’ll call him when work finishes.’

Reluctantly, Marisa had shifted her gaze and nodded stiffly. ‘Only an hour to go,’ she’d said, the expensive gold watch sliding down her smooth brown forearm as she raised her slim wrist to look at the dial. ‘You can follow me on your Vespa. To my place.’

I can, can I?

Now the automated gates swung smoothly closed behind them as Roxana dismounted on to the gravel path. The air up here was different. It was different for the rich, all right. It smelled of roses and wet grass; a sprinkler was rotating beside the big, square villa, a glittering rainbow behind the flowerbeds.

There were two cars parked against the villa: the Cinquecento and a little canary-yellow Punto. The other inhabitants of the villa must be away for the summer, as Marisa would have been if Claudio hadn’t been so inconveniently killed. Or inconveniently killed himself.

Marisa was still in the car, tapping something into her mobile. As Roxana watched, she climbed out and briefly her long-legged frame stuck in the car’s low-slung door; she looked uncomfortable, wrong, awkward. And for a second Roxana wondered whether it was all made up, all an illusion. She hadn’t gone with Paolo on Thursday, Val had said. What if this wasn’t really her place and Marisa was housesitting, she was squatting, her boyfriend and his yacht didn’t really exist at all, it was borrowed, all borrowed? What next? She’d got her tan at a campsite, her clothes from a discount outlet?

Marisa put the phone away. ‘Paolo,’ she said briefly. ‘He’s in Elba.’ And strode past Roxana towards the villa’s vast door.

Sweetly Val had whispered to her as they’d left Marisa’s office, ‘I’ll call him. The private detective guy.’

And he’d quickly gone to the spot by the door where you got the best signal and dialled the number, while Roxana had looked from her counter at Val hunched over his phone, then at the closed door to Marisa’s office, and back again at Val. Urging him on.

It had been almost a relief when he’d hung up, shaking his head, and hurried back to his post. ‘Engaged,’ he hissed, sliding back into his seat. ‘Busy guy.’

Roxana had realized she wanted to talk to Sandro Cellini herself, anyway. Not here, though, not in the toxic gloom of the bank, where everyone could hear everything she said.

Why was that? she asked herself, hurrying across the gravel after Marisa, who was impatiently holding open the heavy door. The scent of roses and jasmine was almost too much, along with the hypnotic motion of the sprinkler and the sense that there were servants, discreet and well-trained, hovering just out of sight.

Why did she want to talk to Sandro Cellini? There’d been something in the man’s eyes, something of her father’s look as he stood in the cantina by his jars of nails, turning some part of machinery over in his oil-stained hands and working out what it did and how to fix it.

Damn, thought Roxana, and in a moment of panic she stuffed her hands in her pockets, looking for it. Had she given it to Val? Cellini’s card. Would he be in the phone book? Roxana was in the phone book, sensible ordinary people didn’t have any problem with being in the phone book – and then there it was, dog-eared but intact, in her shirt pocket.

‘Coming,’ she said. ‘Sorry.’ And slipped inside.

Marisa had the ground floor of the villa: cool, even in weather like this. They came into a wide, dim hallway, pale flagstones on the floor, two sets of double doors on either side of it. There was a smell of polish, of wood and leather and cold stone: all seemed chill, clean, empty of life.

‘Hello?’ Marisa called out, her voice high-pitched and strained. Roxana saw her look down and as her eyes adjusted she noticed that a small neat suitcase stood beside a console table. Marisa’s shoulders relaxed just a little. ‘Ah, Irene?’

The doors on their left opened. ‘Hello, Marisa.’ Irene Brunello stood there a moment, looking from Marisa to Roxana with weary doubt. She seemed much smaller than Roxana remembered from her occasional visits to the bank, sometimes with a young child in tow. Smaller and more uncertain, but dignified.

‘You remember Roxana?’ said Marisa with a stiff gesture. ‘She wanted – she just wanted –’

‘I wanted to say I’m sorry,’ said Roxana, taking a step towards Irene Brunello then stopping abruptly. ‘I’m so sorry.’

Irene Brunello stepped back hurriedly, disappearing into the room, leaving the doors open behind her. There was a quick intake of breath – surely not impatience? – then Marisa went in after her. After a moment’s hesitation Roxana followed. This was a mistake.

Irene Brunello was blowing her nose, and pulling on a jacket. ‘Thank you,’ she said, not looking anyone in the eye. ‘Miss Delfino, Roxana, I didn’t mean to – thank you. It’s just that I haven’t got used to – to this, yet. My mother keeps calling me. The police keep calling me.’ She sat down abruptly on the sofa.

Marisa seemed rooted to the spot.

‘Can I get you anything?’ Roxana asked desperately. ‘A glass of water? A glass of – anything? Brandy?’

‘I’m driving,’ said Irene Brunello, pushing her handkerchief into her pocket. ‘I – it’s time for me to go back to the children. I can’t make arrangements for the – for the – for Claudio’s funeral, they say I can’t do that yet. I have to tell the children.’

Roxana sat beside her and took her hand. It felt cold. ‘Your mother’s with them?’ she said.

Irene nodded. ‘At the seaside,’ she said, with such desperate mournfulness that Roxana felt like crying herself.

‘You don’t mind if I have one?’ said Marisa, her back to them. Roxana heard something clink and smelled whisky.

‘They’ll be all right, for a bit,’ said Roxana. ‘They’ll be asleep by the time you get back, won’t they?’

Irene looked at her, struggling to regain composure.

‘You can’t tell them at night,’ said Roxana, knowing she was right. ‘You have to do it in the morning.’

Irene frowned. ‘No,’ she said. ‘You’re right.’

Marisa came over and sat on the opposite sofa, nursing a large tumbler of amber liquid on her narrow knees.

‘The police called?’ she said, her tone made careless by the whisky.

‘They came by,’ said Irene, sitting there with her hands in her lap clasped so tight the knuckles were white. ‘I went with them to our apartment. There was nothing, I told them, nothing was out of place, everything was normal.’ There was a tremor then to her voice. ‘The gas and the water were switched off, just as we always leave them, there was no sign that anyone had been there, but they took things from his desk, anyway.’

‘Things?’ said Marisa distantly. ‘Do they know anything yet?’

Roxana tensed: the question seemed so brutal. Irene Brunello looked at Marisa curiously, as if she didn’t know her. ‘I don’t think they do,’ she said, trying to keep her voice steady. ‘They just ask me questions. More questions. They never answer any.’

‘What questions?’ Marisa took another slug from her tumbler, and Roxana stared at her, willing her to shut up. Saw the greedy expression in her eyes and it occurred to her that Marisa was a drunk. Maybe she usually had it under control, maybe she was just good at hiding it.

‘It’s all right,’ she said, keeping hold of Irene Brunello’s hand. ‘You don’t need to go over it again.’

Irene showed no sign of having heard, staring at the long window open on to the grass and the rainbow shed by those sprinklers spinning to and fro. ‘I don’t think I would like to live here,’ she said and turned to look Marisa in the eye. ‘It’s too quiet. I need to hear – something. To hear other people. The children.’

Marisa looked away from her, down into her glass. She could pretend to be embarrassed by the non sequitur, but Irene was right. It was too quiet out here.

Detaching her hand gently from Roxana’s, Irene sat up very straight. ‘The questions didn’t make sense to me,’ she said. ‘They asked me if we had money worries, then if we’d had a windfall recently. They asked me if the bank was in trouble. They asked me how Claudio was behaving when there was talk of a takeover of the bank, a few months ago.’

She shook her head. ‘I said, we were careful with money, always: that didn’t change. I said, Claudio dealt with all the money matters. I said, Claudio took everything seriously.’ She was sitting very still and Roxana saw that it was becoming harder and harder for her, not breaking down. ‘He was honest. He was an honest man.

‘It wasn’t the normal thing, to go to the big supermarket in La Spezia, because it was cheaper. Only I think now that was an excuse. He never went to the supermarket, he was coming to Florence to meet someone, and he knew I would be angry, so he told a lie. He was coming to Florence all the time.’ The words came out in a rush. Roxana saw Marisa was very careful not to raise her head.

‘They said that?’ asked Roxana gently.

Irene shook her head. ‘They said they’d been in contact with the mobile phone company and at ten o’clock someone had called Claudio’s mobile, from Florence, on a prepaid phone, bought God knows where, not registered. They asked me if I recognized the number.’

‘Did you?’ Marisa’s eyes were fixed intently on Irene now, and Roxana wondered for a second whether she’d been brought out here to play the part of good cop in Marisa’s planned interrogation.

‘I know it wasn’t your number, Marisa,’ said Irene. ‘It’s all right.’ The two looked at each other with a strange sort of calm. Irene turned back to Roxana.

‘I didn’t recognize it,’ she said dully. ‘But I don’t have a good memory for numbers. When all you have to do is press a button on the phone, you don’t need to remember a number any more.’

She looked at Roxana. ‘I wonder,’ and as she said this she tilted her head stiffly as if to relieve some pain. ‘Did I leave too much to him? Would a good wife have known all about bank accounts and mobile phones and takeovers?’

‘You did know,’ said Roxana gently, not knowing where the words were coming from. ‘You knew your husband inside out, he relied on you for everything. You were a good wife. You are a good mother.’

On the far sofa Marisa made a stifled sound and got to her feet, stalking back to the liquor cabinet on her long legs.

Irene didn’t even turn her head.

‘I don’t know,’ she said in a whisper. ‘I don’t know anything any more. How could this happen to us?’

‘Terrible things do happen,’ said Marisa, leaning back against the cabinet with her newly filled glass in her hand. ‘We manage not to think about them, that’s all.’ But her voice was cool and distant.

Irene Brunello did turn her head then and looked at Marisa for a long moment, before getting to her feet, smoothing her skirt carefully, buttoning her jacket. When she spoke her voice was steady again. ‘I should go,’ she said. ‘If I leave now, I will be – will be home by nine. At the sea, I mean. By nine.’ She smiled tentatively down at Roxana. ‘Thank you for coming,’ she said. ‘It was good of you.’

Roxana stood too. ‘You know how to get hold of me,’ she said. ‘If you – if you need – if I can help.’

‘I know how to get hold of you?’

‘You called my home. When …’ And Roxana saw Irene Brunello’s face crumple.

‘I did,’ she said, ‘oh, I did.’ Catching a sob in her throat. ‘When I didn’t know where he was, I was desperate.’ She passed a hand over her face. ‘What was I thinking of? I called Inquiries for numbers all over the place, anyone I could think of.’ Her hand stopped at her mouth, covering it. ‘God. I talked to your mother.’

‘It’s all right,’ said Roxana, wishing she hadn’t said anything. ‘Of course you phoned. We would all have done the same.’

She didn’t even bother to look over at Marisa to recruit her. Marisa wouldn’t have called anyone. Irene’s shoulders dropped, as if she was close to exhaustion.

Gently, Roxana put a hand under her elbow, guiding her towards the door, edging her out, Marisa watching their every step without moving until they were out in the hall. Then Roxana heard the heavy clunk of the tumbler put back down on the sideboard, and at the front door Marisa appeared beside them. Irene picked up her bag.

While they’d been inside, the light had faded and in the dusk the roses glowed against the luminous green of the grass, the sprinklers only audible as the faintest rhythmic swish.

‘Goodbye, Irene,’ said Marisa lightly, and leaned forward just slightly as to accept a formal kiss.

Irene came no closer, only held out her hand. ‘Goodbye, Marisa,’ she said and Roxana wondered if they would ever see each other again, these two. At a memorial service, at the funeral? Perhaps the police would never solve this thing: perhaps they’d never release the body. Claudio would stay in a police morgue forever. Marisa stepped back, her eyes very black.

‘He liked you,’ said Irene, turning to Roxana. ‘Claudio did. He worried about you.’

Roxana didn’t even know what to say. Worried about me? And knowing that if she opened her mouth she would burst into tears, she just bobbed her head, except that she could feel the tears anyway. Irene leaned in and pressed her cheek against Roxana’s. ‘It never meant anything, you know. She never meant anything to him.’

Roxana froze. Claudio. She was talking about Claudio?

Irene drew her head back, just a fraction, her face so close she might have been about to kiss Roxana. ‘She was here,’ she whispered. ‘The maid – she has a maid, the girl doesn’t like her-told me, before she went. Here all the weekend. Her boyfriend-her boyfriend with his yacht. He has told her to leave. But I can’t even be pleased about that.’ And then abruptly she stepped back and straightened her shoulders.

The little yellow car waited on the gravel and Irene made her precise, determined way towards it, but halfway there something stopped her.

Irene Brunello set her handbag down on the gravel and knelt beside it, looking inside, then peering, then scrabbling. Roxana could hear her hurried, shallow breaths, and then the high tinkle of a phone from somewhere in the jumbled contents of the bag. She could feel her own hands clenched into fists as she willed Irene to stay calm.

He’s dead, she wanted to say, nothing’s going to bring him back. The worst has already happened.

Irene straightened, got to her feet, the mobile in her hand and half the contents of her bag on the gravel. ‘Hello,’ she said, breathlessly, ‘hello?’ Then, dully, ‘Oh. Oh, it’s you. Yes.’

Roxana hurried across to help gather up the contents of the bag while there was still light. Fumbling about on her knees, she couldn’t help hearing the conversation – or one side of it – being conducted over her head. Then she stood, holding out the bag.

‘Who?’ Irene was saying, sounding tormented. ‘No, no. I’ve no idea who that is. No, we weren’t buying property, no. I don’t know this man.’ She was holding one hand over her ear, and she swung round to look into Roxana’s face with incomprehension. ‘How much?’ Her voice went up a note in panic. ‘No. I don’t know anything about it, he didn’t tell me anything about it. Please.’

Over Irene’s shoulder, Roxana could see Marisa on the doorstep, four, five metres away, arms folded and the tumbler in one hand, her face sallow in the dusk. She could hear the urgent crackle of a voice talking to Irene and wanted to say, shut up, leave her alone. He was a good man. He was.

‘I can’t talk to you about this now,’ Irene said, with a desperate attempt to sound calm. ‘I don’t know this man and I have to go home to my children now.’ And she clicked the phone shut.

Still holding out the handbag, Roxana said nothing. Irene took it, dropped the mobile inside, slung it over her shoulder and walked in silence to the car but at the door, as she climbed in, she looked up at Roxana. ‘I don’t know what they meant,’ she said. ‘The policeman said another man was dead and there may be some connection.’

‘Another man?’

There was a sudden silence, except for the evening song of the birds in the trees, thousands of them, it seemed to Roxana, in all this luxurious expanse of garden and trees and shrubs, filling the air.

‘A man, a man,’ said Irene, her face upturned. ‘Found dead at Bellosguardo beside his car, they thought a mugging at first. He had the cutting in his pocket, from the paper. Where Claudio’s death was reported.’ She was very pale, the thought of another death, another family bereaved, making her face a blank of fear. ‘An estate agent.’

‘A coincidence,’ said Roxana, trying to think. Trying to make sense of it. ‘Surely it could be just – I don’t know.’

Did people cut out random pieces from the paper? But Irene’s expression suggested that there was no room for the possibility of coincidence – that this was bad news, and everything was horribly connected.

‘They asked if we were buying a property,’ she said as though talking to herself. ‘The police. They said Claudio had – they said he had – the Guardia di Finanza said—’ And she stopped. ‘I can’t,’ she said. ‘I can’t think about it.’

‘It’s all right,’ said Roxana, taking hold of her arm. ‘Call me later. Call me tomorrow. Call me any time, Irene. This will be all right.’

‘He said that,’ said Irene Brunello, and Roxana knew she wouldn’t call. ‘He said that. But I don’t know if it can be all right.’ Roxana stepped back and Irene pulled the door closed, wound down the window. ‘Goodbye, Roxana,’ she said.

Who told her it would be all right? Watching the slow movement of the automated gates opening, the blink of the tail-lights as the car disappeared, Roxana could only think, ridiculously, of Sandro Cellini.

‘Don’t,’ she called back to Marisa, her hand poised over the button that would close the gates again. ‘Leave them. I’m going too.’ Going home to see Ma, to pay the handyman, to sit a while in the dark until she felt safe again. To call Sandro Cellini.

‘As you wish,’ said Marisa, arms folded across her body again in that pose of hers that said, Come no closer. ‘That could have been worse,’ she said with a stiff smile as Roxana leaned down to pick up her helmet.

‘You think?’ said Roxana, pulling on the helmet, horribly uncomfortable in the heat; for a second she longed for the motorino rides of her early teenage years, hair flying in the wind along the coast road, arms round some boy.

Could it really be true, what Irene had said about Marisa’s boyfriend? Was it some way of – lashing out? Or had Roxana just imagined it, had she misheard? One thing was for certain, she wasn’t going to ask Marisa.

Would she even say thank you? Thank you for coming, for talking to the bereaved woman, for diluting the grief? Of course she wouldn’t.

‘Thank you,’ said Marisa. Roxana gawped.

‘She hates me,’ said Marisa.

It was the whisky talking. Marisa drained the glass.

‘You could do worse than Val, you know,’ she said then, looking down her nose. Her languid voice was only slightly slurred. ‘It’s all about family, you see, about connections. He’s got his own apartment, all he needs is a wife, and he likes you, I can tell. He told me today he’d sold the motorbike, can you imagine that? Growing up: this has made him grow up.’ She paused, her huge eyes gleaming as she gazed up to the darkening sky. ‘You’ve got nothing,’ she said, ‘no security, if your family’s not connected, that’s how things are. Particularly now.’

Roxana stared at her: there was too much to argue with in this little speech for her even to get started on it. Particularly now – what? Particularly now we’re all out of a job? He likes me? She hadn’t even thought about that. And looking at Marisa she thought, you’re probably not even my boss any more, I don’t need to be polite to you. But she found she didn’t want to be rude either.

‘I don’t need Val,’ she said, swinging a leg over her Vespa. ‘I’ve got a family.’

‘I’ll let you know when we re-open,’ called Marisa, ‘keep in touch,’ as the gates began to close behind Roxana. She raised a hand in acknowledgement and turned her head just slightly. Marisa stood there on the porch of the villa that wasn’t hers and seemed in that moment to Roxana to be absolutely alone.