CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

IT TURNED OUT TO be surprisingly easy to get Carlotta to talk. Almost as if all she’d needed was to be asked. A slight show of surprise, suspicion, then she jumped at the chance.

The house inside was identical in layout to Ma’s, only the smells were different. She was older, of course, and lonelier. She had a son but he didn’t live with her, hadn’t done so for years, not since he’d married an Abruzzese. No one to cook or clean for, so it was fustier, sourer. A smell of cat. But everything was neat and dusted, and she led Roxana straight on to the back porch.

‘Oh, yes,’ she said immediately with relish, standing with her wiry old arms folded as Roxana squeezed herself on to a chair beside the clothes airer. ‘I saw him all right. Or them, I should say.’ And narrowed her eyes to observe Roxana’s reaction.

Another one like Ma: all fuddlement and slow steps on the outside, but inside things were working perfectly.

‘Them?’

Carlotta craned her neck to look over into their garden next door. ‘Where’s your mother?’ she asked. ‘How come she doesn’t ask?’

‘Oh, Carlotta,’ said Roxana, ‘you know Ma.’

And the old woman just raised her sharp chin in acknowledgement. They both turned to look out across the garden.

Carlotta’s little patch was much neater, more cut back than Ma’s. Her son came out to do it once in a while. Three rows of tomatoes growing against the left-hand wall, some sparse flowerbeds edged in decorative terracotta, an abundance of hideous ornaments. Cherubs with watering cans, miniature wooden houses, that kind of thing. But nothing tall, not like Ma’s loquat and banana palm, to block out the world and the view. You could see straight to the back fence, and beyond it.

‘We talking about Tuesday?’ Carlotta said. She leaned on the veranda’s balustrade with both stringy arms. ‘Mid-morning, I heard the doorbell go. So of course I went to the front and looked. Didn’t get much of a look, but I could see his shoulder.’ She frowned. ‘Some kind of boiler suit, he was wearing. Overalls. Too big for him.’

‘Like a delivery man?’

Decisively Carlotta shook her head. ‘More like – a mechanic, kind of thing your Dad would have put on, to tinker with the car.’ She gave Roxana a quick, sly glance. ‘Anyway. His voice. I listened. He was pleading. He sounded—’ She shook her head. ‘Sounded funny.’ She was frowning fiercely.

‘Funny?’

‘Well. Foreign. And – not normal. I thought – well, drugs, you know.’

‘Foreign,’ Roxana said slowly. ‘But you didn’t get a look at him.’

‘Oh, I did, later,’ Carlotta said, folding her arms. ‘That’s when I sent him packing.’

‘Hold on,’ Roxana said. ‘So what happened, exactly?’

‘He stayed at the front door a while, just talking to her in this voice, through the door. Soft, begging her.’ Pursed her lips. ‘Sounded like he knew her. Or knew you.’

‘You just listened.’

Of course she did. Roxana tried to moderate her resentment, thinking of Ma behind her door, frightened. Tried to remind herself that Carlotta was scared, too. Carlotta just shot her a glance that said, What did you want me to do?

‘Then he came round the back,’ she said. ‘He disappeared, then came round the back, in the alley. Couldn’t see him, but I knew he was there.’

Two terrified old women.

‘He called Ma by name?’

‘I thought he was saying, Signorina Delfino.’

Roxana inhaled, holding it.

‘A small man, dark. Dark eyes. Like a Roma. A gypsy.’ She spoke slowly. Carlotta was staring at her.

‘Josef,’ Roxana said.

He came looking for me. She heard Sandro Cellini’s words: he trusted you. A bad feeling, a worse feeling than the one she’d had when she first saw the smashed back gate, rose in her.

‘You said you sent him packing.’

‘He was there all day. I heard him.’ Ma had said the same thing, and Roxana had disbelieved her. ‘Making sounds, at the back gate, like he was trying to get through.’

‘You didn’t call the police.’

Carlotta gave her a look – stubborn, suspicious, weary – that conveyed all Roxana needed to know about being a lonely old woman.

‘I wanted a look at him,’ she said. ‘That was what I was waiting for. I went to the back of the garden, very quiet. He’d got in, he was inside, watching, crouched down, I think, and he stood up suddenly and he was right there. Face to face.’ Carlotta’s woman’s face was alive at the memory, her old mouth quivering. ‘I shouted at him then, I’m calling the police!’

‘He scared you.’

Carlotta refocused on her, and Roxana saw her relive it. ‘He was – it was his face. It wasn’t even human. Looked like he’d been beaten half to death.’ She pursed her lips. ‘It was a shock.’

Roxana didn’t say anything, didn’t suggest the man might have needed help. She could hear Carlotta’s angry guilt in her next words. ‘He ran off, then.’ The old woman turned back to her stubbornly. ‘Well, what was I to do?’

Roxana nodded, not listening. Josef Cynaricz had come to her for help. She looked up. Or had he come after her? Was he a victim, or – had Claudio fought back? There was a connection. Absently she felt in her pockets, thinking, I must tell Sandro Cellini this, where’s that mobile? Then she remembered where it was. Call him now, from the house phone. Or go and get the mobile? What if – what if people had been trying to get hold of her? What people? She could hear Ma’s scornful voice in her head. Ten minutes on the motorino, and she’d have it back in her pocket.

She stood up. ‘Thanks, Carlotta,’ she said, trying to contain a stupid, pointless panic rising in her, just because she didn’t have her phone. Patted her neighbour’s hand in a belated gesture of pity.

‘What about the other one, though?’ the old woman said slyly, detaining her.

‘The other one?’

‘The one that came after,’ said Carlotta. ‘Came yesterday. The kid. He came looking, too. White – sports shoes. Bright white.’

White shoes. And into Roxana’s head came the image of a kid in low slung jeans she’d mistaken for a drug dealer. Hopping up and down outside the bank in white trainers.

*

Walking up the hill towards Bellosguardo, Sandro cursed himself for an idiot, for not bringing the car. His breath was laboured, and the humidity was intense as he climbed towards the grey-lidded sky. It was a bloody long way.

Time to think? How could anyone think, in heat like this? He paused to lean against a low wall, and looked back.

The patchwork of roofs spread out before him, intensely red in the strange, lowering light, and it occurred to Sandro that this was where you would come to see the façade of every church in the city. He ticked them off for a while, waiting for his breath to ease, Santa Maria Novella, Santo Spirito, Santa Croce, took in the aggressively pointed bulk of the new university development on the north of the city, the muddle of light industrial units and pylons where the city dissolved into ugliness at Sesto. Thought of the secret places hidden under the red roofs, the loggias and marble porticoes. The dusty streets around the synagogue, the grimy bars, the dumpsters. The Carnevale.

Nearly there. Sandro mopped his forehead, pushed off from the wall and doggedly walked on: he had no idea if his heart was up to this, at his age. Never having had any kind of check-up, just assuming that, if there was a weakness there, thirty years of police work would already have finished him off. Did he exercise? If walking very slowly counted. Did he drink? Yes. Smoke? No. But it didn’t always work like that, did it? There were risk factors, of course he knew there were, but even so. Sometimes you got no warning.

It wasn’t the climb, either. The horrible feeling, hardening to stone somewhere below his ribs, didn’t come from mere exertion of his ageing muscles; he wasn’t frightened of what his heart might do, he was frightened of something else. Risk factors. Did these include climbing on a piece of packing case to peer in at a cracked and filthy window round the side of a derelict porn cinema?

The street had been empty. Liliana and her little van had disappeared around the corner, leaving no more than a bluish tinge to the air. The Carnevale was boarded up, the fencing smooth and impenetrable, new pine and padlocks and signage with a drawing of an Alsatian. Above the glaring wood, the dirty façade looked even bleaker and uglier than ever; how could it have survived so long? Only the complacency of the city’s surveyors and assessors, the academicians and bureaucrats who refused to allow even a new shutter to be erected, could have allowed this canker of a place. Sandro had skirted the pine boarding, round to the alley – no more than a man’s width – that ran alongside the cinema.

The flank of the building was big and blind – a characteristic of theatres generally, Sandro acknowledged. A high, almost blank wall with the stinking alley underneath it – and it had stunk. Dog faeces and urine, intensified by the heat and the confined space. Moving along it with extreme reluctance, Sandro had came to a door and stopped. A plain, small door in the blackened wall, and the lock and doorknob were shiny with use. Sandro had taken the single step back that the space allowed. Narrow, featureless and dirty, the door could not have been more banal – but it was something else. It was the real point of entry, it was the secret life of this building. That had been when it had started up inside him, the slow tightening of that obscure and dangerous muscle: fear. He had pushed the door; it had resisted. Of course.

Further along the alley, something had gleamed on the ground, some stinking liquid, and there had been a pallet propped against the wall. Beyond it, a couple of metres up, he had noticed a small makeshift window of the sort inserted illegally all over the city, on the cheap and out of sight, to provide the bare minimum of light and ventilation. Holding his breath, Sandro had moved on.

Stopping below the small, high, broken window, the pallet at his feet, a feeling of aversion as strong as he had ever experienced had come over Sandro. There was a protruding overflow pipe of some kind to the right of the window, offering itself as a handhold: Sandro had set his foot on the pallet, tested it, reached up and taken hold of the pipe. As he had pulled himself up in the cramped space, the sudden sense of his own sagging weight, his singular uselessness and vulnerability, had pressed in on him like gravity, a choking sensation that he had had to fight to overcome, to continue upwards, inching until his face was there, his arm already aching, the ridiculous old man that he was turning out to be.

And at first, he had seen nothing anyway. The glass was filthy and behind it all was dark.

The pane had been cracked and a triangular segment had fallen away. Gingerly Sandro had pushed at it with his free hand, dust on his fingertip, and the old dried putty had given way, the glass moving inwards. He had eased his head sideways so as to see in without blocking the light.

What was there? Almost nothing. But Sandro had had the terrible sensation of being about to fall, whether backwards or forwards he didn’t know, and of wanting, suddenly, urgently wanting to be back at home with Luisa in his kitchen and not here: the last place he had wanted to be was here, or perhaps worse than here was the next step, to be inside this building against whose wall he was so unwillingly pressed.

He had glanced into a small, empty room. A mattress on the floor in one corner, the dirty inside of a duvet, thin with age, bundled on it, shadowed and crumpled. Stained: worse than stained. An old cooker that might have come out of a dumpster, askew in one corner. Something on the wall. All up the wall. And the smell.

Head down now and plodding in the grey heat of the hillside with the rhythmic saw of the cicadas resonating among the trees, Sandro found himself pinching his nostrils against even the memory of the smell he’d left below him in the city. The ammoniac secretions of that alley and something thicker, dirtier, coming up at him from inside the Carnevale. Still climbing towards Bellosguardo, not far now, he heard a voice calling him from higher up; he kept his head down just a moment longer, told himself to keep moving. He had thought that he would vomit, there in the alley, make his own sour contribution to the stench. He had swayed, his grip had loosened a moment on the piece of dirty pipe, his foot had slipped and clattered. But he had not fallen; he hadn’t vomited.

‘Hey, pal,’ came the voice again, concern creeping in, and Sandro raised his head and saw his oldest friend standing in the lee of a building, the low, square shape of a farmhouse behind him.

He was drenched in sweat, quite suddenly, and Pietro’s hand encountered a sopping sleeve.

‘You didn’t bring the car?’ Pietro was aghast. ‘Madonna, Sandro. What are you thinking?’ From the far side of the hill, down towards Scandicci, there was an ominous rumble.

‘I’m fine,’ Sandro muttered, feeling the reassuringly regular thump of his poor old heart. He mopped his forehead, leaned against the rough brick. The city was hazed below him now; was that the light, or were his eyes doing something funny? He took a moment. Pietro remained silent, watching him.

‘No need to ask why here, then,’ Sandro said when he began to feel more normal, although the light was still strange and thick. Pulling out the newspaper. This was the farmhouse in the picture, with Galeotti’s car in the foreground, the body under its sheeting. Car and body gone, now.

‘No,’ Pietro said shortly. ‘The girls are cursing me. This job. Now another murder. And we were hoping to get away.’

‘It’s connected,’ Sandro said. Both had their eyes on a bleached stretch of road towards the mulberry trees.

Pietro looked at him curiously. ‘They found a cutting in his pocket,’ he said. ‘About Brunello’s body being found. But you didn’t know that.’

Sandro nodded towards the trees. ‘Come on,’ he said, and together they set off, towards the crime scene. Pietro’s car was parked in the shade of the farmhouse: his own vehicle. They walked past it and carried on.

‘Where’s Matteucci?’ Sandro said. ‘Your shadow?’

Pietro chewed his lip. ‘He’s not so bad,’ he said. ‘Just young. Following something up this morning. I’ll tell you about it.’

The short row of manicured mulberry trees, and a view down towards the white tower blocks of Scandicci, glittering in a distant shaft of sun cast down from a heavy sky. Meadow grass and the dried heads of wild iris: the cicadas, he realized, had fallen silent.

‘Storm coming,’ he remarked.

‘Oh, yes,’ Pietro said. ‘The forecast was crazy, this morning. They said there was a mini-tornado on the Po plain last night. A lot of damage.’

Below them lay the foothills of the Alps, visible on a good day. This was not a good day: a thunderhead a couple of kilometres high was spread across the entire western horizon, darkening by the minute.

They stood quite still. ‘Better out here,’ Sandro said, feeling his head clear. ‘Sometimes you need to get out of the city.’ But he felt exposed; what was the rule about lightning? Don’t stand under a tree.

There was a silence. ‘Oh,’ said Pietro suddenly. ‘We found Brunello’s car. It had been towed away on Monday when the street-cleaning vehicles came through. It had been by the river, just down from the bank; where he always parked it for work, according to the woman.’

‘What woman?’ Sandro was alert, thinking of Roxana Delfino.

‘What’s her name? Goldman: his second-in-command.’

Another silence. ‘Yes’, Sandro said slowly. ‘About her. About Marisa Goldman. Did she tell you where she was, that weekend?’

Pietro eyed him warily. ‘She did,’ he said. ‘She was away with her boyfriend. On his yacht.’

Sandro nodded. ‘Well,’ he said. ‘You might want to corroborate that. With the boyfriend, to begin with.’

‘Oh yes,’ Pietro said, with just the faintest trace of a smile. ‘I’ll get Matteucci on to it.’

‘Someone saw her. Standing on the doorstep of Brunello’s apartment, at seven that Friday night. After she was supposed to be gone for the weekend. After he was supposed to be gone, too, for that matter.’

Pietro nodded. ‘The traffic wasn’t as bad as usual, you know. That Friday night. I didn’t want—’

‘You didn’t want to mention that to Irene Brunello?’ Sandro said. ‘To suggest that her husband might have been doing something else that night?’

Pietro shrugged. ‘He might have been packing, for all I knew,’ he said. ‘The fact that his car wasn’t logged through the tolls until eight-forty-five, even though he left work early – well. I was going to wait until I had more information. Before telling anybody.’

Even me, thought Sandro. Claudio Brunello wasn’t his client, nor was his wife. Why should Pietro tell him?

‘The two tumblers,’ he said, remembering. ‘On the draining board in Brunello’s flat.’

And then he remembered where he’d seen Galeotti’s letterhead: lying on Marisa Goldman’s desk.

‘You mind if I talk to Marisa Goldman first?’ he asked, knowing this would be a big favour.

Pietro gave him a sharp glance, then sighed. ‘Christ knows, this murder’s tying me up. All right,’ he said. ‘But do it now.’

Sandro exhaled. ‘So,’ he said. ‘The car. You found the car.’

‘Goldman and Brunello?’ Pietro turned to gaze without focusing across the glittering valley, gave a slow nod. ‘Could be right. Maybe.’ He turned back to look at Sandro. ‘The car was dean, or near enough. No violence, no bloodstains, it had obviously just been sitting there since Saturday afternoon, then some helpful vigile ordered it to be towed out of the way of the street cleaners. Clean enough, except for just one thing: a scrap of paper in the passenger footwell. Josef C, and a number written on it.’

‘Ah,’ said Sandro, and felt it loosen, the intractable tangle of this damned case, one thread coming free, at last. ‘So the person who called him was Josef. Josef C is Josef Cynaricz. My Josef, Anna’s Josef. Not Goldman, or Galeotti.’

Sandro thought of Brunello, the scrupulous bank manager, sitting inside his holiday house while his wife prepared the children for the beach. Josef C repeating to him, ‘Take the number, write down the number.’ Even though it would have appeared on the phone, Brunello was old-school, like Sandro. He wanted it written down.

Pietro said nothing, then nodded quickly.

‘He called Brunello out on the first day of his holiday. A young man he knew only as a low-grade customer, who maybe once came in and asked for a loan, no more than that? He must have had something important to say.’

‘Must have.’

They’d reached the bloodstain, and both stopped and looked down.

‘And now Galeotti.’ Pietro looked at Sandro through eyes narrowed against the sky’s glare. ‘You didn’t know about the cutting he had in his pocket. But you thought there was a connection. Between Galeotti and – who? And Brunello?’

‘Not Brunello,’ said Sandro. ‘Josef.’

Pietro took a step back, watching him, and Sandro went on, ‘Galeotti was the agent for the apartment my Josef was “borrowing.” Only I think Josef believed he was going to get to keep the place. Someone let him think that. Maybe Galeotti, or maybe Galeotti was doing it as a favour to someone else. Galeotti’s just the middle man, isn’t he? The agent, doing favours to get favours. Keys to empty apartments are part of his currency.’

Pietro nodded cautiously. ‘Still,’ he said slowly. ‘Murder? Over a borrowed apartment?’

Sandro nodded too. ‘I know,’ he said. ‘But I can’t help thinking – it’s connected. Perhaps whoever was doing the favour – whoever was trying to keep Josef happy—’ He stopped, unable to follow his train of thought. Was it the heat? He started again. ‘I heard Galeotti was a crook,’ he said. ‘And I heard he had some big deal going down.’

Pietro let out a quick, astonished laugh. ‘How’d you know this stuff?’ he said, shaking his head a little.

Sandro examined his expression. ‘It’s true, then?’ he asked.

Pietro chewed his lip. ‘We went down to his office last night, a place on the Via Romana. We talked to the girl. Secretary-cum-receptionist, more or less the only other employee. He kept her pretty much in the dark, and she didn’t seem too bright to start with, but she said he’d been involved with a big deal for the last couple of months, very secretive about it because it wasn’t in the bag, a lot of to-ing and fro-ing, she said. Some big backhanders involved, you know how it works. The buyer’s in cahoots with the agent, they get the place cheap and slip him some money on the side. In this case who knows – maybe someone else was involved, someone the seller trusts.’

Sandro frowned. The only trustworthy bloke he’d come across in this whole business was Brunello, and he was dead.

Pietro sighed. ‘A month or so back it was all on, then it was all off, then it was back on again. Something kept blocking the sale. And, if I remember right, she said he’d gone off Friday night all keyed up for a big showdown, and he came in on Monday full of something. She was in shock when she heard he was dead. Total shock.’

‘He was the kind of man – I don’t know,’ said Sandro. ‘Cocky. Full of life.’

And there was that nagging regret again. For the loss of even a man like Galeotti, with his gleaming car and his crisp collars.

‘You met him?’ Pietro asked.

‘I told you, didn’t I? This place we were looking to buy, in San Niccolo.’ Pietro looked sympathetic, and Sandro shrugged. ‘Not much chance of that now. What with one thing and another.’

Pietro’s hand came up to Sandro’s shoulder. ‘It’s good to see you, Sandro,’ he said. ‘You know? Sometimes it’s hard to do this without you.’

Sandro said nothing. Instead, he squatted, and Pietro came down beside him. There were chalk marks on the road and the blood had turned black. It would disappear, eventually.

‘Last Friday night. Galeotti was expecting big news last Friday night,’ said Sandro softly, almost to himself. Then he remembered something, took the paper out of his pocket. The sweat had dried on his forehead; he felt almost human again.

‘Says here, you’ve got a suspect,’ he said.

Pietro looked at him, a slow smile spreading across his face at last, running his hand through the grass at the verge. ‘Well, there’s the thing,’ he said, and he pulled out an ear of wheatgrass. ‘We have.’

‘Not my Josef?’

Pietro shook his head. ‘Not your Josef, no.’ Still smiling. ‘You remember that little weasel Gulli? Nasty little dealer from Campo di Marte, prone to violence?’

Sandro nodded. He remembered Gulli as clear as day the last time he’d seen him, being marched into the courts of justice in Piazza San Firenze, between him and Pietro on a charge of aggravated burglary. Twenty-five or so then, but skinny as a kid, hard, thin arms under Sandro’s hand, stonewashed jeans, slicked hair. White trainers.

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I remember Gulli.’

‘We’ve got a witness.’

‘Saw him do it?’

‘Good as,’ said Pietro ruminatively. ‘Old woman at the soft drinks stall at the bottom of the hill on the viale, saw him go past about two on a Vespa, saw him turn up the hill; she even says she saw something like a tyre iron strapped to the back of the moped. Recognized him. Must be tricky for him, plenty know Gulli, he’s done enough people enough bad turns, considering he’s still under thirty. It seems he mugged the old girl’s daughter three years back and did only six weeks for it; she held a grudge.’ Pietro spread his hands, dropping the piece of grass. ‘Galeotti’s body was discovered at just before three and he was barely dead then.’

‘All right,’ said Sandro, thinking hard. ‘So where’s Gulli now?’ Pietro stood up with sudden, enviable ease. He was, Sandro couldn’t forget, five years his junior. More creakily, he followed.

Pietro’s smile faded, but not by much.

‘We’ll find him,’ he said. ‘Kid like Gulli never goes too far from home.’

‘What’s the motive?’ Sandro asked. Something about this wasn’t right. ‘What was it, just a mugging? A bit off the beaten track for that.’

‘And he wasn’t robbed,’ said Pietro. ‘Mobile gone, yes. But a full wallet. Man had seven hundred-odd euros on him, as well. Untouched.’

‘Cash backhander, no doubt,’ pondered Sandro, momentarily sidetracked. ‘Lot of cash. Not like Gulli. Unless—’

‘Unless Gulli’s taking a step up the career path. From violent burglar to hit man.’

‘Incompetent hit man: that would figure,’ Sandro murmured. It had always surprised him how stupid criminals like Gulli could be. ‘Bad luck he was recognized.’ He paused. ‘I wonder where Gulli was on Saturday afternoon?’

He could see Pietro chewing the inside of his cheek gloomily. ‘In custody, as a matter of fact,’ he said. ‘I checked arrest reports, first off, to make sure he wasn’t inside and it was mistaken identity. Because Gulli’s been inside more than out, this last ten years.’

Nothing to lose: prison was like home to the likes of Gulli. Get paid plenty to hit someone; the worst that happens is you’re inside another fifteen years. They had no concept of the span of a life, these kids. Of what it might be like to wake up when you’re forty and know it was all gone. The best of it, anyway.

Pietro sighed. ‘He was brought in for trying to pickpocket Saturday morning, released without charge Sunday morning. But we’ll find him. There’ll be DNA, it’ll stick, too.’ But he sounded demoralized.

‘So where are you looking?’ Sandro wanted to keep on this trail. ‘Who might have asked him to hit Galeotti?’

‘Gulli’s gone upmarket,’ said Pietro thoughtfully. ‘He’s been seen in some very smart places.’

‘Smart places?’

‘That bar, by the British Consulate. San Niccolo, up here even.’

The sweat was beading again on Sandro’s upper lip. ‘Listen,’ he said. ‘Listen. What have we got? A crooked estate agent, a banker, a porn cinema up for redevelopment. A lowlife like Gulli.’

Where, he thought, where had he seen Galeotti’s name? His letterhead.

‘Ah,’ said Pietro, and now a wind got up, fierce and hot, flattening the grass, sweeping across the hillside down to Scandicci. ‘There’s something—’ he said. ‘The cinema, you said? There was something I had to tell you. About Brunello.’

‘Yes?’

‘The ash, on his feet. Celluloid: burned film, old film. Old ash, too, not recently burned, more like dust with traces of the ash in it.’

Film. Sandro had known all along, it seemed to him: had known even before he raised himself up on that pallet. Pietro was still talking, but Sandro’s mind was already elsewhere.

‘The lesion on his leg – a burn, they say, inflicted post-mortem, thought there might be a connection with the ash but—’ A pause. ‘Sandro? Are you listening?’

A big property, up for redevelopment: it was staring him in the face. The Carnevale.

‘You know what I’d like to know?’ he said. ‘I’d like to know who was selling that building, and when that deal went through. And I’d like to know what the Guardia found in that bank.’

Pietro snorted. ‘Right,’ he said. ‘And I’d like early retirement and a Testarossa. Dream on, Sandro.’

‘Oh, I don’t know,’ said Sandro. ‘There could be a way.’

*

Luisa heard the wind sweeping over the roofs as she stood at her wardrobe, trying to decide what to wear. And trying not to think about the things that frightened her.

That girl with her great belly. That was the most important thing, and the most urgent. Luisa knew better than anyone that it wasn’t so easy, that little skip from eight months gone to holding the baby safe and new in your arms. There were things that happened out of sight, a cord twisting, too much of this chemical or that, an enzyme malfunctioning. She’d seen the girl trying to batten down, to keep herself safe against everything that was going on, but sometimes that wasn’t enough.

The wind came then, rattling down the street, blowing something ahead of it with a clatter. Something else came loose overhead with a scraping sound.

Giuli. What had that expression been, on the girl’s face last night as she left to go home? Trying to smile as she said goodbye, but she’d only looked haunted, bewildered. Had the man, Enzo, whoever he was, had he said something? Done something?

Luisa reached into the wardrobe: what was the weather going to do? Linen. It would be crumpled in ten minutes with this humidity. She pulled it out anyway, dressed herself with habitual meticulousness. Bathroom. Scent on her wrists, a scrap of make-up. Reaching towards the mirror, Luisa saw she was too thin in the face: her mother had always told her it was a danger, in old age. But she couldn’t eat, in this heat.

Dropping a cotton ball into the wastebasket, she saw it. Leaned down under the sink, pulled the basket out and peered inside. Nothing more than a scrap of thin shiny plastic with some blue letters on it, something clinical about it. GRAV – and the rest was missing. Not a whole wrapper, but a shard of one. Luisa puzzled over it, and looked further in, and there was a small sheet of printed paper, concertinaed to fit in a packet, like a packet that might contain pills. Sandro? She unfolded it and saw that this would be nothing to do with Sandro. It was a set of instructions from a pregnancy testing kit.

Slowly Luisa pushed the paper into her pocket. So that was what Giuli had been doing in the bathroom all that time, last night. And the face she’d left with? The news Giuli had received had not been the news she wanted. Feeling a sudden chill of the kind a fever might give you, Luisa locked up carefully, pulled the shutters closed and secured them. The wind was gone again as suddenly as it had come, but you never knew.

The stairwell was clammy and stifling. Luisa let herself out on to the street and was startled by how dark it had grown, like doomsday. Who would want to go shopping on a day like this? Plenty would; Luisa had been in the business long enough to know that, even when across the world towers were falling, someone would be in Frollini, asking her for a pair of gloves in just the right shade of cream. The door closed behind her, and Luisa looked at her watch: it was nine o’clock in the morning and it looked like dusk.

Anna Niescu: there was a limit to Luisa’s power over the unborn. Giuli: she had to trust that the girl – the woman – was strong enough, and clever enough, to deal with the news she’d received, and to manage a bit of love in her life. But Sandro: that was another matter altogether.

And it was back, the wind, gusting up the street, gathering strength, sandblasting her with dirt from the street, forcing her to tug down her skirt. Luisa turned into it, feeling it pull at her, behind her something crashed to the ground and then the wind was gone again and her hair fell back into place.

Anna; Giuli. They were the young, they would have to manage. But Sandro. She’d been trying to tell herself this case was just a missing fiancé, but it wasn’t. A man was dead. A husband, a father, beaten to death and dumped.

She had trained herself during Sandro’s thirty years in the Polizia dello Stato to assume that he was safe. To rationalize: he was thorough, he was careful, he had good reflexes. He would come home.

Until he didn’t.